


Once You Eliminate the Impossible

by yellowb



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2017-02-25
Packaged: 2018-08-27 22:58:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,324
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8420458
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yellowb/pseuds/yellowb
Summary: Inspector Summers of the Reykjavik police force has finally got her big chance: she’s in charge of a murder case.   A disturbing murder case with indications of sorcery. Some crazy person out there doesn’t seem to realize the supernatural just isn’t real. AU, not AH; everyone is what they are in canon.It’s been very fun to work with these TV characters that I will never make any money off of. They continue to be owned by their owners despite my manipulation. The plot and words are mine; please do not repost or republish without permission.





	1. The Inspector

**Author's Note:**

> So very, very non-canon compliant. Things do work the same way as in canon, more or less, though the Council must have been stretched a bit thin when Buffy was called. I wanted to write a Spuffy Icelandic detective story, but I just couldn’t find my way in – having Buffy as a detective who is great at her job but bad at office politics, eats poorly, and is lousy at maintaining interpersonal ties – as the Nordic mystery genre more or less demands – was just all too familiar. But then I considered what Buffy would be like if her competencies were reversed: what if she were all about taking care of her own mental/emotional well-being and education and career, but in denial about her supernatural destiny and the forces of darkness surrounding her. Would she still be Buffy? Why, yes; yes she would – a happier, more emotionally resilient Buffy. And you’d still have to pity the poor vamp who falls for her, but maybe a little bit less. 
> 
> This story is written for the lovelies over at Elysian Fields, who fill and refill these characters over and over in the most innovative and interesting ways. I stumbled across the site when I was looking up villanelles, which led me to anaross’s My Life Closed Twice (with its fantastic demon poetry classes), which in turn led me to read HUNDREDS OF OTHER STORIES with increasing fascination. (And to actually watch some of Angel.) Y’all have inspired me to write my first fiction since college, over 25 years ago, so thank you!
> 
> Also, my apologies to Iceland. I was only there for 9 days, and I wrote most of this first, which was a fantastic and fun way to do travel research – but I’m sure I got a ton of things dead wrong in this story. One I am aware of: despite considerable & ongoing efforts to replace the trees cleared by the original Viking-age settlers, it’s not clear to me there’s a forest like the one I describe in this story anywhere near where Spike lives along the northern coast. We didn’t quite have time to explore his road, because we wanted to go to Krafla. In any case, you should all go drive the Ring Road, and stop off in both sets of fjords, and definitely visit and eat at the Museum of Sorcery in Holmavik. But only go once and then leave the place alone, because really: I want it all for myself.

     Inspector Summers was over the moon.  She had a murder all her own.  She knew that feeling joy about a killing was wrong, on the most basic and obvious of levels; that her very own special corpse would turn out to have people who grieved for the person it used to be; and she knew all too well what the grief of losing family, a loved one, felt like. But right now, driving out of Reykjavik towards the crime scene in Glaumbær, she couldn’t help feeling a pure charge of triumph at finally being allowed to do what she knew, instinctively, she was meant to do with her life.

     Not that Buffy believed in destiny – she positively did not buy into mystical crap. Not organized religion, not pre-ordained fate, not monsters in the dark. But she knew what made her happy; she knew when she was at her best; and she knew how to work toward a goal. And she’d worked very hard at her current job in the Reykjavik Police department. She’d issued a plethora of tickets, broken up tourist bar brawls, and saved puppies from storm drains with equal vigor – occasionally, as had been pointed out, a tad too much on the vigor and the breakage, but she was working on that. She just didn’t always recognize how very effective her workouts had become. She’d been promoted ahead of her peers after an impressive smuggling bust, and now: she had been assigned a homicide.

     In truth, a homicide outside Reykjavik was unlikely to provide much of an opportunity to showcase her investigative skills. Icelandic murders – well, the people who wrote those grim Nordic detective novels, what with the incest and the serial murdering and the tattoos were, she would say, “stretching it” when it came to Iceland. Of the three homicides that had occurred in the entire country since Buffy had joined the force, one had been called in by the sobbing perpetrator, who’d stayed beside his late wife’s body until the police arrived; the second, by the murderer’s bartender, recipient of a full and steadily more drunken confession, within a few hours of the killing. Buffy had still been a constable and assigned to assist in the investigation of the third, and it remained unsolved. But that was most likely because it was an accidental shooting death, rather than an intentional crime; the person who fired the bullet may not ever have known it hit a woman, killing her in front of her lover almost instantaneously. The bullet was a common type of bullet, most likely fired from a common type of gun; and there’d been no identifiable motive. With so little to go on, the case had been shelved pending further developments.

     In any case, Buffy would stop singing quite so happily and insensitively when she reached the crime scene. She had her own murder investigation, and she was wearing new stompy boots she’d sworn she wasn’t going to buy, and it was crisp and early, the call having come in to wake her  _very_  early.  _One night Iceland, and the shoe racks tumble / Not much between two pair and ecstasy…_  Since it was midwinter in northern Iceland, she’d be lucky if it was light for an hour towards the end of the investigation. The scattered structures along Route 1 reared up out of the dark at her like an erratic series of giant, desolate teeth in a very old jawbone, many of them shuttered for the off-season. They looked like you’d find small animals nesting in the cabinets, bats hanging from the rafters. It was probably snowing in Glaumbær; she could see that the sky, merely night-dark above her, was darker and more curdled by clouds up ahead.

Buffy’s singing slowed as she considered the call that had summoned her. There had clearly been something that Anyanka, the District Medical Officer, didn’t want to say over the radio. And the Medical Officer was generally very upfront about saying  _exactly_  what she thought – it was something Buffy admired about her; she was straight-forward to an extreme. In someone less talented, that trait could have been a liability. Anyanka combined it with tremendous practicality, intelligence, and a profound lack of squeamishness that made her perfectly suited to her job. Offhand, Buffy could think of only two kinds of information Anyanka might have been reluctant to broadcast: the murder might involve somebody well-known or well-connected; or something about the crime scene might suggest police corruption.

     Buffy’s singing picked up again. Either of those complications would call for the kind of subtlety and nuance that could show her superiors just how able and ready she was for advancement. She was breaking into a happy chorus as she swung off of the two-lane highway onto the unpaved side road that would take her to the crime scene. Trace amounts of snow were beginning to swirl in her headlights, melting as they touched the warmed windshield. When a streak of darkness crossed her beams, she swerved and braked – she’d been going a reasonable speed for a winding road in the snow, but still too fast to avoid a sickening, soft thump.

     Buffy put the car in park, and got out. A cat, a black cat, had been thrown a little way off the road, just outside the beam of the headlights. Its eyes were open and still. She crouched and gently closed the cat’s eyes. After a moment, she realized she couldn’t leave the cat – almost certainly a pet – dead on the roadside, even with its eyes closed. It would be fundamentally indecent. In the dark she couldn’t be certain, but she didn’t see blood on the body, just a little at its mouth. In any case, if she got blood on her clothes she’d clean them later. The body would have to go in the trunk; in the cold that would be okay until she could figure out what to do. She gathered the cat in her arms.

     Feeling the cat’s weight against her, but with none of the essential poise of a cat, Buffy was abruptly, unpleasantly, reminded of the dream she had been dreaming when the phone rang this morning. It had been vivid, and intense; but not the kind of reality-based dream she would go plumb for hidden meaning with her therapist. This had been …  _creepy_. She’d been standing on a lava field, full of confidence about what she was about to confront: some criminal, some bad person she was going to apprehend. But she could feel that something deep down about the scenario was profane; there was an undercurrent of nothing being at all what it seemed; a mounting, twisting dread beneath the apparent normalcy. Or what dream-Buffy accepted as normalcy.

     Up ahead of her, she knew, was her partner; further still, her guide. (Who was her partner? Who was her guide? Dream Buffy didn’t raise her eyes to let non-dream Buffy see.) She was confident they would triumph over what they faced –

     And then some switch flipped, and she was a different being, watching herself and her team from behind, through the rocks, and possessed of a strikingly alien intelligence. She almost couldn’t think about it from outside of the dream – her attention kept shifting away from touching on that awareness – anything at all was enough to stop her from thinking  _like_   _that_. And it wasn’t until now, feeling the essential wrongness of the weight of the no-longer-a-cat against her chest, that it came back to her with any clarity. The thing whose dream-mind she’d sunk into, the thing behind her, saw her without anything she could identify as vision; it  _felt_  her as a fleck of something, a flaw, a hole in a necessary continuity, marring and blackening and corrupting an essential pattern – something that screamed out for amelioration, for repair, for serious healing.

     Buffy screamed when the cat lurched out of her arms, scrabbling away from her with clawed back feet. After a moment she realized the new, fluffier flakes of snow surrounding her were actually tufts of floating goose down bursting from the shredded sleeve of her police parka. The cat glared back at her for a moment, eyes catching the light as balefully as if she’d really killed it, before it padded away, sinuous and deliberate and affirmatively still cat, into the dark.

     Buffy realized she was shuddering so hard her teeth hurt. How very grateful she was to be headed to a nice, safe, murdered corpse harboring some sort of unspeakable secret.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Buffy’s Icelandic crime stats are not far-fetched: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25201471
> 
> Also, in case you don’t know the song Buffy is mangling, which neither Buffy nor I realized was from a musical about chess? Written by ABBA? until I looked it up for y’all, it’s here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rgc_LRjlbTU
> 
> It has now been pointed out to me that that version of that song is actually being sung by Giles' real-life brother. So there you go.


	2. The District Medical Officer

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A big thank you to Gort for her enthusiasm in beta’ing this! All remaining run-on sentences and word repetitions exist despite her patient efforts.

       The raven was two things at once: he was a natural bird and he was a mystical bird. Both halves of the raven perceived the world as a series of circles. When he was a-wing, the widest circle was the horizon, delineating both the bottom of the sky and the circumference of the earthly world. Far below him, the tiny spell circle attracted both his selves: the charged sand called to him in his role as a magical message bearer, while the blooded corpse tugged at his dumb carrion brain. His path through the air spiraled downwards and inwards, contained by the horizon but narrowing ever closer to the spell circle. When the needs of his dual natures finally came together into one irresistible urge, he plummeted, down down down, nearly stunned by the force of his landing on a fence post. He released a series of harsh, guttural warning cries.

       Anyanka barely flinched at the noise as she bagged the corpse’s hands. She certainly knew what was what when it came to harbingers of doom; but she was currently both fully professionally engaged in gathering evidence, and impatient. Buffy had yet to arrive from Reykjavik. Analytically, Anya knew there had barely been enough time for the drive. But so many disparate and unlikely things had had to happen at once to create this unique opportunity; and she was _so_ ready to get this show on the road. First, a murder with obvious dark magic components. Second, the complete anomaly of a 30-something Slayer with a day job as an ambitious Police Inspector. Iceland, land of the midnight sun, was unsurprisingly a land with a historic lack of actual vampires or Slayers to fight them – although it had its proper share of other fell and undead things. (Anyanka had pondered the potential profit margin of a travel agency devoted to bringing vampires to Iceland for the dark months of the year, but the arrangements would be a logistical nightmare. And who knew what trouble would be stirred up by the introduction of vamps to a whole different ecosystem of demons? Not to mention the liability insurance.) Third, of course, there was Anyanka herself, an equally anomalous 1,000-year-old ex-demon in charge of forensics for the same police department. Even in her most imaginative days of vengeance – and she’d been praised and valued for her diabolical imagination – Anyanka could not have dreamt up a crime-solving scenario so likely to fully engage every facet of who she was. It was going to be a tremendous experience.

       And she was going to face that scenario with a colleague who could appreciate every aspect of this unlikely set of facts alongside her. After almost fifteen years of pretending she’d always been human, the idea of a partnership in which all her many lifetimes of experience were appreciated was … well. It made her glad to be here, now, exactly as she was.

       Once she’d seen the corpse, arrayed in a spell circle, flayed from the waistline to the toes, she’d known it was worth using up her political capital to get Buffy assigned to the case. And she knew Buffy – okay, not very well. But she knew that Buffy wouldn’t stop to question why she’d been assigned a case outside Reykjavik;  she’d just seize the day and drive to Glambaer, and probably joyfully mangle the Latin for seizing the day. Pausing to seal an evidence bag, Anyanka frowned slightly. She and Buffy had only worked together on the human crime side of things; they’d never discussed their demon-world affiliations. But as careful as Anyanka usually tried to be about her past, in this case it was nothing to worry about. The woman was obviously the Slayer, and no doubt had detected Anyanka’s background within moments of their first meeting. The fact Buffy had been accepting and friendly immediately – well, Anya’d felt quite moved by the Slayer’s generous nature. She could see exactly why there was virtually no gossip about the woman in demon circles. Who could bad mouth a Slayer who really _got_ the complexities of the world.

       And Anyanka greatly appreciated Buffy’s “let’s pretend we’re just successful women” approach, so admirably subtle and confident. It was one of the reasons Anyanka enjoyed Buffy’s company, especially with the bonus of watching her all but flaunt her supernatural strength in front of their male colleagues. Buffy was a kind of feminist, demonist superhero, wholly at ease with the totality of who she was. She’d melded the halves of her life like – like that raven over there, squawking on endlessly about dissolution and despair, the upending of the great balance, the waking of the long-sleeping wyrm; all the while also positively jonesing for a simple bite of dead flesh. Buffy was a highly successful human. She’d somehow avoided the emotional stunting that usually came with her calling. She’d maintained a secret identity to an extent that was very difficult for front-line nightly protectors of humankind; and yet she was perfectly straightforward and friendly to harmless ex-demons who absolutely didn’t deserve to be slayed for their maleficent pasts now that they were productive members of society. Anyanka was even willing to be the sidekick in this duo – a sidekick with rare and useful expertise, of course. Not a comic foil.

       Anyanka paused, considering the body and its increasing dusting of snow, before snapping her wrist out towards her assistant for another evidence vial. The skinning looked as though it had been done manually, not magically; there could be DNA evidence around the edges of the waist, where the skin of the man’s upper half abruptly ended and the exposed musculature of the lower half began. Though upon consideration, it would be wise to document the rough edge of the skin before scraping. “Erlinger, get the SLR back out please, with the zoom. And the flexible tripod.” That was the problem with outdoor winter crime in Iceland: the destructive realities of freezing flesh; crime scenes slowly buried in white; and the unflattering, flattening effect of flash. Murders worthy of documentation should really be a daytime, summer thing.

      

 

       Buffy had been anticipating heading up her own investigation for years – ever since, as a young teen, she’d realized she wanted to help people the way the Los Angeles detectives had helped her. Perhaps that was the problem. The weight of all that expectation. She’d been loaded up with adrenaline that was then preemptively used up by that … absolutely never-killed cat.

     Certainly all the right trappings for her expectations were in place. The haphazardly-parked squad cars, with their flashing lights illuminating red and blue globes of snow as though it fell only within their glow. The constables and assistants, each going about their duties, but somehow en masse projecting gentle, milling chaos. The crime scene tape – who was it going to warn away, on an unpaved road, over an hour from so much as a gas station? The harsh portable lighting set up around the body contrasted starkly with the night landscape. Frost hummocks had colonized the field, so regular as to seem man-made, their shapes softened by tufts of dried grass. A roofless shell of a barn stood nearby with a partially collapsed fence.

     She should have been on fire, ready to go. Instead, she’d arrived feeling already drained, so drained that it had taken her a minute to appreciate that the corpse – her very own special corpse – was not, in fact, wearing odd pink-and-red pants. He was beyond naked – he was kind of _extra_ _pantsless_ , skinned from the waist to his toes. And Anyanka, whom she had been so looking forward to working with, was distractingly wound up, tighter than a … tighter than a very tight thing, almost manic. And talking non-stop. Buffy was grateful that at least the constables had retreated toward the squad cars, and they were alone.

       “– I mean the state of the body, the fact it doesn’t appear to have been interred, suggests that this is _not_ the work of any kind of experienced practitioner. Never mind the open eyes. It’s a short spell — it only takes the most basic reading to know that both consent and post-burial skinning are essential elements if you want to end up with functioning nábrók — and looking at the expression on this man’s face –” Given a comprehensible phrase, Buffy did look at the victim’s agonized, bulging-eyed face. “I’d say he was not _at all_ consenting. He may very well not even have died before he was skinned, never mind have been buried. I mean, what kind of sorcerer, what kind of lame-o witch do you have to be to ignore the basics?”

       Buffy was marginally aware that the very large bird that had been making distracting noises was getting louder, hopping closer to them along the fence. It really had an amazingly cruel, curved beak. Anyanka seemed to have finally stopped, and Buffy said weakly, “Anyanka – ” But the pause had just been some sort of verbal feint, or maybe Anyanka had really, really needed to breathe, because she was continuing on and what on earth was she saying now?

        “– of course you probably know, being what you are,” and here Anyanka cast what was clearly a Significant Look at Buffy, although what it signified was entirely opaque to her, “that the new director at the Museum of Sorcery is quite the scholar. He’s working on a fascinating treatise about the unusual flexibility of Icelandic spell casting. I believe his thesis is that in this strain of magic, the staves and spells aren’t grouped at the outset into benevolent versus evil categories of magic. The trappings and intent and treatment of the ingredients take on far greater significance than in other magical traditions. So for instance, if you want to create necropants for something positive, like producing lots of money, you’d use benevolent means and materials. On the other hand, in order to make pants that produce something more nefarious you might intentionally add pain and suffer-”

       Buffy burst into loud, slightly hysterical laughter. The bird seemed to take this as a cue to make a lot more noise. Buffy could see, now that it had moved into the well-lit circle surrounding the corpse, that it was some sort of mega-crow, iridescently blue-green-black. Anyanka paused and looked at her directly. “What – Anyanka, _what_ are you talking about? I’m sorry, but _sorcery_? This is a crime scene.” Buffy knew her voice was uncharacteristically stressed and high, and her face must show the strain she was feeling, because Anyanka was suddenly tremendously focused on her. “A crime scene. We’re here processing an actual, physical crime scene in the real world. There is _no such thing_ _as sorcery_.”   Buffy stopped herself, realizing she was almost babbling. There was a short silence. Anyanka’s face tilted, intense, and then her expression shifted, becoming almost fearful. Then two things happened, so quickly they seemed almost simultaneous. The bird dropped from the post, flying straight toward Buffy, squawking mightily; and Buffy, without a shred of thought, hit it out of the air with her billy club.   It landed with audible impact in the middle of the corpse, her very own special pantsless corpse about which she had just recently been so enthused; and there it lay. Its eyes were circles, perfect open circles, and Buffy was reminded of the cat, and the cat reminded her of the dream-thing, and she was willing to think about anything but her mind-meld with the dream-thing behind her with those intolerably strange thoughts. Look how very black that bird was on top of the snow-frosted corpse, inside the shining sand circle, inside the circle of the harsh artificial lights.

       Anyanka’s assistant, headed back towards them from the police van after packing away the camera, stopped in his tracks and stared at the new addition to the crime scene. A few black feathers drifted amid the light, lazy swirls of snow. Anyanka said slowly, “I think we should start this conversation over.” She smiled thinly, without losing the frown lines between her eyes. “Let’s pretend you just got here, Inspector.”

 

      

         _One night in Iceland, and the witches fumble_

         _Not much between nowhere and devilry_

         _One night in Iceland, and the blackbirds tumble_

         _Can’t be too careful with your company_

     By the time Buffy turned back onto Route 1 she was singing again. She didn’t know why she’d let that flukey incident with the black cat rattle her – so much so that she’d thought someone as fundamentally sensible as the District Medical Officer was taking magic seriously. After the equally flukey incident with the monster blackbird … Buffy frowned a moment about that coincidence, before shaking it off and regrouping. After demonstrating her excellent skills with the use of non-lethal force against threatening wildlife – that was much better! – they’d gotten back to analyzing the crime scene. Scientifically.

       Anyanka’s report had been, in the end, quite simple and stark. The man had been killed, possibly by blood loss associated with mutilation, although they’d know more about the order of events leading to his death after a full autopsy. There were no identifying papers or clothing at the scene, and possibly less blood than there should have been. The approximate time of death was midnight, though the absence of skin would have affected the rate of the cooling of the body somewhat unpredictably. The mutilations appeared, at a glance, to have been done competently but somewhat roughly – probably not by an experienced surgeon or butcher. “Perhaps, though, ” Anyanka had said thoughtfully, “by a good cook. You know, someone who can butterfly a chicken.” A full report would be available over the next couple of days.

       Constables were checking photographs of the victim against booking mugshots, travel documents, and missing persons reports. They would go door to door in the two closest towns with headshots as soon as reasonably good ones could be produced.

       There was evidence that the mutilation had occurred as part of an occult practice, so the perpetrator might believe in sorcery; alternatively, he or she might have wanted to instill fear in a believer. Anyanka had briefly outlined the 17th-century Icelandic ritual involved in making necropants out of the skin of a man from the waist down. Based on the theory that such a thing was involved, Buffy had an appointment to meet with the Director of the Museum of Sorcery and Witchcraft the following day. Once Buffy had calmed down, Anyanka had been as competent, professional, and helpful as Buffy had known she would be; it really had just been a matter of Buffy’s perception. And she was going to get a better grip on that perception, because this was her very own case, with her very own Pantsless Man, and she was going to solve it.

       _One night in Iceland and the world’s much moister…_

       Anyanka got in the passenger side of the department SUV. The body had been wrapped and packed off to her lab, and now Erlinger would drive them both back. She would autopsy the body. She would analyze the sand used for the spell circle, and even though she already knew what went into such sand, if testing couldn’t determine the contents she wouldn’t report them. She would estimate the shape and design of the blade or blades used. That, at least, would be a truly interesting and challenging process. She would investigate as though there might be defensive DNA traces, though she’d bet her soul the poor man had been magically subdued and forced to watch his own skinning until he passed out (and she was not one to undervalue her soul in a bet). She would write a report that carefully avoided exposing just how much of an expert she was in witchcraft and spells from a wide variety of traditions. She felt like crying from frustration and loneliness and disappointment; and when she had an unclaimed moment, she would do that too.  

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Glambaer, chosen somewhat at random for this chapter, is also the location of a preserved and rebuilt sod-roofed farm in Northern Iceland is now a museum and tea room. Even though our guidebooks and the website said it would be closed in October, when we pulled into the nearest gas station on the Ring Road, someone had put out a scrawled whiteboard saying it was open. It’s full of artifacts from a very hard life – my favorite might have been the ice skates made from sheep bones – yet you can tell this was a well-appointed farm, maybe considered luxurious. http://www.glaumbaer.is/is/information/glaumbaer-farm
> 
> No one called me out on my blatant homage to the metaphysical novels of John Gardner in Chapter 1 – imagine that! Poor Gardner; even if you write brilliantly, if you insult John Updike and then die young, it’s like you were never here at all. I particularly recommend The Sunlight Dialogues, where his mastery of gleeful, evil foreshadowing is on display.


	3. The Museum Director

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a very hard week, but I've been so grateful to see my favorite stories here continue; and this had been written and beta'd already.
> 
> A serious thank you to Gort for that beta-ing! All remaining or new run-on sentences, questionable wordings, or general errors are mine.

     Buffy had opted for the route along the shore, so now she was late. This was her first trip to the Westfjords. When she and Riley had been together, they’d discussed a camping trip in the area — but somehow the timing was never right, their plans never finalized. She supposed she’d been expecting the Icelandic equivalent of Route 1 in California. A pretty road that made you slip into the role of the anonymously beautiful person in a car commercial. And paved; she’d definitely imagined a wide, swooping, paved road along the ocean.

     She flipped the windshield wipers faster, and slowed for another blind, hairpin turn. The dirt road was two lanes, each exactly wide enough for cars traveling in opposite directions to not scrape each other if they passed carefully, and it had no shoulder whatsoever. Instead of a guardrail to her right, the land simply dropped away a good hundred meters to where jagged rocks rose up out of the crashing waters of the fjord. The potholes had been breeding. She’d found the route exhilarating for the first twenty minutes; now, she had to remind herself not to break another squad car steering wheel from gripping it too hard.

     Presumably, the Museum Director would still be available whenever she got there. How many appointments could the director of the Museum of Icelandic Sorcery and Witchcraft, located in a town of less than 400 people, have on his schedule in a day? Anyanka had made him sound like a serious scholar. But maybe he wore a sorcerer’s costume to work; maybe his waiting room was filled with witches, conical hats all a-bob as they cackled over the most recent research into eye of newt.

     By the time she had finally coasted into Hólmavík and found the long, low structure that housed the museum, Buffy’s expectations had settled at the low end. She thought of the amateur Fire Museum she and her mother had once gone to in California, with reclaimed mannequins positioned to act out the scenes of famous fires, wigs askew as they battled tissue-paper flames. By the time they’d left, Joyce and she had been tearing up with laughter, gasping for breath. It had been worth the five dollar entrance fee in pure silliness, and made a sweet memory. This museum really could be no worse.

When she opened the front door, she realized she had entirely underestimated the place. She was standing in a small but impressive library, the shelves along the wall reaching all the way to the ceiling. In the center of the room was a long table; on a stand on the end facing the entrance lay an inviting guest book with the heft of an ancient family bible. Through an open screen door to the side of the room Buffy could see into a homey kitchen, and straight ahead lay the entrance to the museum’s exhibits. There was no one in sight. “Hello? Mr. Giles?”

     She walked past the table and the counter with the cash register into the museum proper. Although the first exhibit was something of a joke — an empty cube purporting to contain a local legend known as “The Invisible Boy” — she could see at a glance that the bulk of the exhibits were informative, somewhat gruesome, and well curated. The show-stopper of the collection was immediately apparent. In the far corner hung what Buffy instantly knew to be a pair of necropants.

     They drew her across the room, not in any magical way of course, but through sheer grimness and physicality. It had not occurred to her that pants made from a corpse’s skin would be translucent … almost glowing. Or that they would nearly hum with intent and power. Or, for that matter, that they would include the toes – squick – as well as far more private areas. Double – no,  _triple_  squick. She was shaken out of her contemplations by the sound of a door slamming and footsteps coming toward her.

     “Welcome to the Museum! Inspector Summers, I presume?” The Director was a definitively English type, almost a parody of a tweedy librarian. Something about the amusement in his eyes as he reached to shake her hand made her think he was putting on an act, covering for a genuinely sharp intellect. His warmth, though, was evident, and she couldn’t help but smile back. “I’m afraid the Invisible Boy re-opens the door if it hasn’t been properly slammed. Particularly on windy days.”

     Buffy laughed. “Yes, hello! You must be Mr. Giles. Thank you for meeting with me on such short notice, and I’m sorry I’m late.”

     “Just Giles, my dear. Trust me, the thought that the police might need a consultation in my area of study – well, it’s both unexpected and quite pleasant. What do you think of our necropants? They’re the only intact pair known to exist.”

     “Honestly, they’re a bit of a shock. Does it count as seeing someone naked if you’re only seeing their skin?”

     “Ha! Well. I suppose you’re usually just seeing the skin when you, ah, I … well.”

     She smiled at him. “It’s just, there’s usually the rest of a person underneath. Seeing it separately is so, so creepy.”

     “Yes. Though creepiness is only one of the reasons they are so fascinating. Usually you see the surface of things, and you make your assumptions about what’s underneath. Here, you can see a fundamental, uncomfortable truth: what’s underneath the surface of things doesn’t have to relate to that surface. In a way, they are deceit made palpable; a crystallization of our darkest fears.” He considered her for a moment.

     “Speaking of discrepancies, you are clearly an American – but a Police Inspector in Reykjavik? How did that come about?”

     “My mother was from Iceland, but I was brought up in the States. I came back here on an impulse after she passed away, just trying to get a handle on her history. And then I ended up staying. But I realize I’ll never be mistaken for a born Icelander, what with the California accent.”

     “Indeed.” He turned back to the necropants. “I’m always interested in the residual power in things that have been created through fervent belief. These artifacts, these pants … to refer back to my own religious traditions, they’re a bit like reliquaries for saints. Something about the strength of belief, the devotion, that went into their creation remains.”

     “It sticks,” acknowledged Buffy; and then more slowly, “I feel it.” She frowned. “I don’t believe in it, but I feel it anyway.”

     “What exactly do you not believe in?” There it was again; there was something honed as a tack underneath his diffident words.

     “I don’t believe that if I put those pants on, it would rain money. I know that’s the purpose of the pants – I looked them up on wikipedia. But I don’t believe in magic.”

     “And religion? Do you believe in other spiritual belief systems?”

     “No, I don’t.”

     Giles turned back to the pants, and his voice took on a scholarly tone. “Actually, no one at any point believed that, exactly, about necropants. Even within the belief system that created them these pants would no longer be effective. Use of the nábrók requires adherence to very strict rules. They have to be slipped on as soon as they are created, at which point they cleave to the maker magically, like their own true skin. The operative magical stave and a special coin must have first been inserted in the pants’, ah, scrotum. If done correctly, the money should multiply every day. Taking the pants off without passing them directly to a new owner – so you slip one leg off you and onto them, and then the other – immediately ends their potency.”

     Buffy considered him, suddenly much more serious. “You remember from our phone call that whatever I tell you about the case needs to stay private for now. We aren’t releasing details to the public just yet.”

     “Yes, I do recall.”

     “Then here’s a question: if my murderer is a believer who has just made himself a pair of necropants, does that mean he’s walking around in them right now? With the Pantsless Man’s toes … stuck to his toes?” She couldn’t help it; she shivered.

     Giles had gone a shade paler and removed his glasses, patting his pockets. “Good heavens. Are you saying you think someone has just performed the necropants ritual?”

     “I’m not, not necessarily. We’re investigating a corpse discovered in a field in Glaumbær. It was skinned from the waist down, and it was in a circle of – well, I’m waiting to find out what material the circle was made of. But it certainly appeared ritualistic.”

     “I see.” Giles replaced his glasses and drew a breath. “Perhaps some tea is in order. Why don’t we sit in the library. Allow me to take your things?”

     As Buffy shrugged out of her wet coat, the sleeve sent a plume of goose down fluffing into the air. Giles raised an eyebrow. “An incident with a cat,” said Buffy grimly. “A not-dead cat.”

     “Excuse me?”

     She sighed. “I’ve had a couple of incidents lately; first a black cat that seemed to be dead, then a giant crow at the crime scene.”

     Giles hung the coat, and turned back to her solicitously. “The ‘giant crow’ was also not dead, I imagine?”

     “Well, yes, of course. I only … I mean, obviously, I thought I was holding a dead cat and then it struggled out of my arms and did that to my coat. And then yesterday at the crime scene there was this bird making so much noise – ”

     “And the, the crow, did it have a curved beak, did you notice? Did it also return to life?” Giles seemed entirely too interested in something she’d intended as conversational filler.

     “It’s nothing, really. Odd coincidences.”

     “Coincidences. Yes. A black cat and a raven. Yes, I quite see.”

    

     Buffy considered the spines of books while Giles rather elaborately prepared tea just inside the kitchen. She didn’t know anything about the occult, but she could tell this collection was the product of decades of obsession. The books were grouped by subject and by language, and many had thick layers of bookmarks tufting from their tops. “Do you read all these languages?”

     “Not all,” he called back. “Not all, but many. The bulk of the collection predates my tenure here, though I have brought along my private library. I think I have – ah, yes, some decent biscuits. Tell me, after you came to Iceland, what turned you towards law enforcement?”

     “Oh, that was already the plan. I’d had a run-in with a very bad man when I was young – it was pure luck I wasn’t kidnapped.” She laughed a little self-consciously, moving past a section of books that appeared to be devoted to vampires. Buffy thought of them as a dumb sort of monster: a faux romantic legend disguising simple predation. “There was this older guy – English, coincidentally – telling me I was special; that I had a destiny. He told me I was the One Girl in All the World who could Save Mankind. You know. If I did just what he wanted.” She frowned at the new section of books, which looked like the titles were written in one of Tolkien’s alphabets.

     Giles had paused in his preparations, and then looked up slowly as she continued. “If I hadn’t let something slip to a teacher who knew what grooming was? I probably would have listened. I would have met his friends. The police wouldn’t have gotten involved.

     “He got pedophilia and aggravated stalking, with transportation across state lines. I testified at trial. He never gave up his associates.” She moved on to – was that Greek? Greek books about the occult? Would vampires in Greece still have Transylvanian accents? “But it ended up being kind of a good thing for me, odd as that sounds. I wasn’t harmed, and I got interested in police work – helping protect people. I actually still make a point of doing ‘stranger-danger’ talks at schools because of it, even though that’s usually a job for new constables. And my mom made me see a therapist, which was probably unnecessary at the time — things didn’t get that far — but it helped me learn the value of talking things through with an objective listener.” She turned and gave him a big California-girl smile as he set a tray on the library table. “I think the whole thing really served to focus my life.

     “But enough about me. Let’s have tea. How did you end up at a museum in the remote Westfjords?”

     “Y- y- yes,” said Giles.

     “Mr. Giles?”

     “Right-o,” said Giles slowly, as though addressing someone she couldn’t actually see. Perhaps the Invisible Boy.

     “Giles.”

     “Uh … yes, the tea. Here, here’s the tea … and biscuits. And if you’d excuse me, just a moment ...” He hustled out of the room, leaving Buffy with a plate of cookies and an empty teacup. She sat. She waited. She heard water running and some splashing.

    

     Giles felt as though the room was spinning. As everyone associated with the Council knew, there’d been no sign of an active Slayer in the 17 years since Merrick had gone off to California to check out a lead and never returned. And here Giles stood, an armchair Watcher long resigned to a non-combative and academic life, tucked in a remote corner of the world, with the Slayer taking tea in his library. An adamant non-believer of a Slayer capable of ignoring obvious supernatural portents. Who had had, even at the tender age of 15, sufficient strength of character to convict her first Watcher of pedophilia. And who now had a successful career putting other people in prison. Lovely and personable though she was, talking to this Slayer about her calling was demonstrably dangerous. And what would the Council try to do, exactly, to a Slayer who had so thoroughly rejected Council doctrine?

     Giles squared himself, and took a deep breath. He’d consider what to tell the Council later. He was called to be a Watcher; she was called to be the Slayer. Somehow, together, they would perform their sacred duties. Even if it had to be done without admitting the existence of magic, their callings, or the undead.

     He could start by assisting her with this homicide. And when the inevitable came about, when it become undeniable that the supernatural was real, then he would be at her side to teach and nurture her in her calling. That was it. He splashed some water on his face, and cleaned his glasses. He returned to the library, and sat and poured them both tea. “My apologies – ah, something in my eye. Do tell me more about your police matter.”

     “There’s not a lot to tell yet — we haven’t identified the victim. But he was male, perhaps 40 years old, and had been half skinned, possibly alive.   His face was … it looked like he’d died screaming.”

     Giles adjusted his glasses. “Horrible and fascinating. You recall I said there were strict rules regarding necropants?”

     “Yes.”

     “One of the most notable elements of their creation is that of consent. The magical power of the pants – ”

     “Ahem,” said Buffy.

     “Excuse me. The supposed magical power of the pants is dependent on the acquiescence of the deceased. To make nábrók, you must find someone who is dying, get them to agree to your desire to use their remains for this purpose, and wait for their natural death.”

     Buffy frowned. “Well. Our coroner happened to be aware of your necropants, so she brought them up as a possibility, but maybe the idea is all just a red herring. Maybe the actual murder was all about torture that happens to look as though someone tried to make necropants.”

     “Anyanka, yes – we are acquainted. People with our … interests tend to find one another, somehow. I do think the fact your body was found in a ceremonial circle is significant – although there are more facts that do not fit. To follow the proper recipe for necropants, the corpse of the deceased has to be buried under the earth in a traditional manner before the skin is removed.”

     “You’re right, that didn’t happen here. But Anyanka mentioned you had a particular theory you were exploring about the flexibility of Icelandic spells.”

     “I do. And what you’ve described could be a deliberate attempt to darken the result of the spell – though what would be considered mystically darker than avarice would be a matter for a debate about basic values. But I wonder if something else might be going on here.”

     “Something else like?” Buffy prodded.

     “What if rather than a deliberate alteration to the procedure, the sorcerer –” When he saw Buffy begin to protest, Giles quickly self-corrected. “What if the  _would-be_ sorcerer simply didn’t take the time to learn the proper method?”

     “You mean, what if we’re facing a murderer who is both disturbed enough to be convinced magic is real, and incompetent at following directions?”

     “Yes, precisely.”

     “I understand what you’re saying, but I’m not sure it helps me,” said Buffy. “Wouldn’t  _anyone_  who believes in hocus pocus be likely to be incompetent?”

     “… Ah,” said Giles, rubbing his temple. “Well. It does potentially tell you something about the character of the person responsible: they are likely rash, sure of themselves without justification, while nonetheless being sloppy in execution. Perhaps they’ve been effortlessly successful in other areas. I don’t think everyone who might believe in magic  _necessarily_  would share those attributes.

     “And there is one other thing: there aren’t a lot of sources for information on how to conduct the ritual, however creatively implemented or poorly done. I suspect you’ll find the resource you consulted says something about the procedures, and I think many of the staves can be found online. Full translations of the spells from the grimoire, however, aren’t widely available. It’s not unlikely that someone interested in Icelandic sorcery would have at least visited this museum; perhaps stood in this very library. And I do meet most of our visitors.”

     “You meet the visitors,” realized Buffy, “and you have a lovely visitors’ book. Does anyone come to mind who was particularly interested in the necropants display?”

     “Well, yes; but that would be the bulk of our visitors. You may recall I found  _you_  studying the necropants – they are the only known pair. Though I will try to think of anyone who stood out. Perhaps you could send someone round to collect the book in the morning, and let me see if looking through it today jogs my memory about someone in particular?”

    

     After finalizing arrangements to have someone pick up the book, Buffy gathered her coat and headed toward the door. She turned back to smile warmly at Giles. “I’ll make sure the constable doesn’t stop by too early. But do call if you think of –”

     “Dear lord. Don’t open the door!” Giles was looking past her through the screen, his face pale. Buffy at first realized only that the light through the door was far dimmer than it should be even for a rainy Icelandic winter day – and then she saw what he saw: a throng of insects so thick it was nearly opaque on the other side of the glass, perhaps two yards away. It was at least a story tall.

     “What  _is_  that?”

     “Well. It seems your recent animal adventures might not be entirely over. I believe that’s a swarm of midges … of near-apocalyptic proportions.”

     “It’s too cold for midges. And ‘apocalyptic’ seems a little –” she broke off as the midges coalesced into a discernable column. They both stared at the mesmerizing, pulsing mass. Impossibly, a dark, giant, buzzing face formed. Impossible, thought Buffy, like the cat, like the bird, like the thing behind her in the dream – what she was seeing wasn’t there. It was just the tendency of the human brain to interpret random things as familiar. Like seeing Elvis on a piece of toast, or Jesus in a dog’s rump. The giant mouth of the giant insectoid face stretched into a mute, accusatory scream. It looked like a nightmare version of the face of the Pantsless Man, grossly distorted. Buffy heard a dull thump and whirled back to Giles, who had fainted dead-away into a heap on the linoleum.

     Faced by a problem she could solve, Buffy instantly rebounded. She resolutely ignored the … nothing-remarkable happening outside, and shut the inner wooden door. They were insects doing perfectly natural insect behaviors, and they would go away or get blown away or freeze. Or she’d find a rear door and avoid them. She lifted the groaning (and apparently quite high-strung, fainting at the nothing-remarkable like that) Director into a chair, and went to fetch some of the cooled tea. Although she was already fond of Giles, he was clearly a little too imaginative and suggestible for his own good. It was probably not a surprising trait in someone who ran a museum dedicated to sorcery. Perhaps she could recommend therapy, in some non-pushy way. It had certainly done her a world of good.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The Museum of Icelandic Witchcraft and Sorcery is in the Westfjords, and it does indeed have the last known set of necropants (though the ones on display are a replica). The door pops open when it’s windy, and the staff blames it on the Invisible Boy. The Museum does not, however, host a full library (though it does have a small one along one side of the dining room, with grimoires and art photography books for sale). It also doesn’t have a live-in British curator, but Sigurður Atlason is charming and funny and makes lamb chops and rhubarb cake to die for. We liked the place so much we changed our travel plans to stay in the area and visit their second location, a restored sod-roofed croft about 25 miles further up the coast, the following day. Also, upstairs they have an amazing collection of hand-written spellbooks and grimoires. Apparently no one has studied these materials – it’s all just waiting to be fodder for some enterprising Watcher’s thesis. http://www.galdrasyning.is
> 
> A few other newsworthy items:
> 
> Icelandic midges are literally apocalyptic — I read it on the inter webs: http://icelandmag.visir.is/article/apocalyptic-swarm-black-flies-lake-myvatn  
> And here’s an odd fact: there are no mosquitos in Iceland. You can find scholarly papers proposing explanations for their absence, but no one has been able to prove a theory. It’s not the weather; Greenland and the Faroe Islands, the two closest land masses, both have mosquitos.


	4. The Expert

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Beta'd by Gort! Thank you, Gort, for making me think.

     Giles eyed the books spilled across the library table, snagging his spectacles as he passed and wincing a little when they allowed him to see the state of the scotch bottle. He made his way to the kitchen to brew some tea. It wasn’t til he’d washed down some aspirin with roughly a half gallon of lukewarm water and was headed back to his research that he spotted the small, empty gift box on the table and remembered exactly what he’d done the previous night. “Oh, dear lord.”

     The Council — well. Under the influence, he’d acted as the Council had taught him. In the heat of the moment, he had been nearly in shock at Buffy’s blank denial of perhaps the most over-the-top Message of Doom of which he had ever heard. Well, fine, it hadn’t rained blood or frogs, but it was certainly the most over-the-top portent of the modern age. He had desperately wanted to wake Buffy up to who and what she was. Pointing her at the only vampire he knew of in Iceland had seemed to make sense. Certainly, there was nothing original about throwing an inexperienced Slayer at a vampire to prove the existence of the creatures; or, for that matter, throwing a troublesome Slayer who failed to accept Council authority at a very powerful vampire. It was a pattern the Council had found useful enough to codify.

     But staring at the museum gift box, all he could think of now was her utter humanity, of the best possible sort. In theory, council doctrine regarding the girls it regularly watched right up until their untimely deaths had always struck him as cold. In practice, it was simply unconscionable. When the pulsing, giant face had formed outside, he — schooled in and even eager to take on the occult — had abandoned his training and panicked. Buffy had simply shut the door on it, choosing instead to do what she could to repair the human world around her, relying on her own practical skills and good heart. She’d accepted his obviously unwelcome gift with genuine kindness, taking pity on his shattered composure. Buffy had a pure soul, and he’d sent her off to face a member of the Scourge of Europe unprepared and alone. There was only one thing to be done. He abruptly abandoned his tea and went to a cupboard, pulling out a duffle bag, and began to pack it with stakes, a small crossbow, and wooden bolts. He dropped bottles of holy water in the outer pocket for good measure.

     Several hours later, Giles pulled the car over well before the house came into sight. Drusilla had been sighted multiple times wandering these northern hills, singing to waterfalls and trying to dance with the sheep; one enterprising and rather reckless farmer had even followed her home. Giles could at least try to avoid driving right up to the house and giving the vampiress advance warning that Buffy had armed backup. What he knew about Drusilla was worrisome: she was old and strong, with an effective thrall. Even as vampires went, she was considered both disturbed and disturbing. It was unclear why her appearance in Iceland had not corresponded to a rash of deaths along the coast. He loaded the crossbow, and slung the duffle over his shoulder. He could only hope he was not too late.

    

    

     Buffy had found the house of Giles’ expert with relatively little difficulty. It might be far afield on an unpaved route with no streetlights, but the driving was a piece of cake compared to the road she’d taken to Hólmavík. He’d called quite late the previous evening, sounding a little groggy. He had indeed remembered a woman who’d displayed a great deal of knowledge about Icelandic spell casting — too much to have blatantly disregarded essential spell elements, but certainly someone she should talk to. Drusilla Hutchins lived along the Northern coast between two small fishing towns. Buffy knew the area mainly because there was a ferry nearby that took adventurous tourists on a short trip to an island even further north so they could say they’d stepped into the Arctic Circle.

     In this part of the country, winter had set in solidly. The area appeared to have also been an early success at reforestation: the pine trees had been established long enough to form genuine woods, and had lost the look of a carefully tended experiment. Snow bowed the branches around the small house as she studied it from the car, absently fingering the gift Giles had pressed on her. She hadn’t wanted to take it — she’d no interest in owning a crucifix, even a chunky Viking-age replica exuding biker chic — but the poor man had just seemed so earnest, and so undone as he recovered from his fright. It was probably quite embarrassing to have fainted over some out-of-season insects.

     The house harkened back to an earlier Iceland, with two dark corrugated peaks joined by a covered hall. With the past week’s snow and sleet, it had a inky, dream-like quality, the light from Buffy’s headlights catching on the ice encasing the grasses trailing down from the roof. The windows were so heavily draped as to barely betray the lights on inside, just rectangles of a less-grudging black inside the white-painted casements. A shed to the side sheltered a dented, muddied car.

     As Buffy trudged from her car to the door, she was hit with an odd feeling. Not déjà vu, exactly — anticipation? This was a physical sensation across the back of her neck, and it felt familiar.  

     Just as she reached the step, something flew at her out of the half-light and she wrenched herself sideways, catching herself on the rough wood door. A bat. It figures, thought Buffy grimly, loosening her billy stick in case it came towards her again. At least she had already established that she had good aim for wildlife. Not that she generally approved of beating up wildlife! Her dislike of the bat, however, was entirely justified: bats were an invasive species in Iceland, arriving as stowaways on freighters. They were therefore solidly in the wrong both as portents (because there were no such things as portents) and as environmental populations (the bats were probably wreaking havoc on the … the native midge swarms …) Buffy gave it up and knocked on the door. She frowned as she noticed her knuckle was bleeding from her earlier stumble.

     Which she forgot utterly when the door opened. The prickles across her neck went ballistic. Maybe there was indeed a mystical component to the world, and maybe her own magical superpower was remote hottie detection. That was a mysticism she would happily accept. The man who had answered the door had chiseled cheekbones worthy of some daytime soap opera star, and bleached white hair that only highlighted the clear blue eyes that narrowed at her as his nose flared. A little young for her, perhaps; he still had some trace of a transcendentally beautiful boy about him. His eyes swept down her, head cocking to the side slightly as he took in the uniform and then coming to rest, oddly, on her hand. There was an awkward moment as they assessed one another, and then the nameless hot man’s eyes met hers as he went with a deeply peculiar conversational gambit, almost hissing: “Slayer…”

     Buffy was suddenly a lot less overwhelmed by the man’s physical beauty. A Billy Idol wannabe was calling  _her_  a thrash metalhead? Where did he get off? She was in a police uniform, with a police cap, her identification clearly displayed. Beyond that, with the biker cross and the stompy boots and the utilitarian duct tape keeping her jacket from losing still more feathers — well, at the very least, she deserved a hissed “PJ Harvey” for post-punk coolness. She felt some slight satisfaction when he flinched aside as she swept forward, righteous and briskly official. She’d show Mr. Cheekbones.

     “Excuse me. I’m Inspector Summers; Drusilla should be expecting me. Mr. Giles from the museum called ahead.”

    

     Spike had to be dreaming. Some kind of magic- or poison-induced, wrong-headed dream. He didn’t really remember what it was like to have a fever as a mortal, but he had a feeling this was the sort of dream a human might have as their brain boiled in their skull. Somehow there was a Slayer in his kitchen — a  _bleeding_  Slayer in his kitchen, smelling delicious and confident and powerful, and chattering on as though he could possibly concentrate on words — and she was expecting to consult with Drusilla? About — did she say  _necropants_? Like any self-respecting vampire even cared about a dribble of ball-sack money. And now said Slayer seemed dead set on sending him to wake up his famously insane sire to have a nice conversation, while eyeing him with what he was nearly certain was a less than innocent appetite. It was a situation entirely outside his experience, 100% wrong, and he wondered whether it might become more comprehensible if he got drunk.

     He hadn’t even known a Slayer had been called in Iceland. It was a weird place to put a Slayer. There were some odd-ball undead, a few local varieties of demons that more or less kept to themselves, and a very decent hellmouth — but he’d yet to run across another vamp. He and Dru wouldn’t be here if she hadn’t gone on and on for months about him needing the midnight sun (because wasn’t that just  _exactly_  what you wished on your devoted vampire lover? Then again, he had listened and found them a freighter, so apparently he hadn’t minded.) Usually the demon grapevine had at least some sort of notion as to where the current boogey-girl was hanging her hat. Come to think of it, he hadn’t heard a credible whisper about Slayer activity in quite some time. Highly unusual.

     Also highly unusual (though admittedly, judging the age of mortal people got harder for him as the decades passed), he was pretty sure this Slayer was in her late 20s, perhaps even her early 30s. Spike was a capable and confident vampire, and when he claimed to be an excellent fighter it was not an unwarranted boast, but a 30-year-old slayer was nonetheless terrifying. That had to be a record — perhaps 15 years of all the forces of hell seeking her out? Nicki Wood had only made it to 22, and she’d been intelligent, talented, and ferocious; Spike knew he’d beaten Nicki, in the end, because she was ready to go. And this Slayer didn’t have any of that stench of exhaustion wafting off her. This Slayer had to be the fiercest, fastest, cleverest, and most dedicated Slayer ever. She must have a hell of a Watcher, or maybe a team of them. Maybe she had an office manager, and a PR person dampening down the gossip, and a fucking cellphone with a GPS demon location app.

     And here he was with her, playing at human in his kitchen like some kind of bad joke, in a house devoid of wards, no protection for Dru asleep next door except himself. With the Best (Worst? Most Deadly?) Chosen One of all time standing far too close to him, leaning on the edge of his table with a small notepad, looking somehow both pissed off and simultaneously hotly … interested. This wasn’t right. She’d probably sharpened her billy club, and she was standing between him and his axe. He shifted, uncomfortably aware of her slightly askew nose and the strands of golden hair that had escaped when she had pulled off her cap. And of her aroma, both of that ambrosial bloodied hand and just  _her_ , all grassy — how could she even smell like that in winter? And her boots; even in this potentially dusty situation, they’d grabbed his attention. There was probably no way to just lean in and lick her knuckle, but imagining it was making it hard to think about other, much more critical things. She was waiting for him to answer a question he hadn’t even heard; she was practically vibrating with impatience. He was probably going to die.

     Spike took an unnecessary breath and forced himself to concentrate on Drusilla, who even in her relatively stable state shouldn’t be facing a super Slayer. Even if Dru had dragged him to Iceland and then dumped him for a wight, she was his sire, his companion, his friend; he would protect her. He considered. Nothing the Slayer had said or done so far had actually been threatening. When the Slayer had asked for Dru, she’d done so with offhand goodwill that felt genuine; even her cross pendant was harmless, a disguised Viking symbol. He’d play it her way for now. “I’m sorry — how can I help you?”

     Buffy sighed. Cheekbones was another Brit, and he seemed to rather like her boots, but he was perhaps not the brightest bulb on the string. “I’m Inspector Summers, here to speak with a Miss Drusilla Hutchins. And you are?”

     “Spike.”

     “Spike.” Her mouth twitched as she wrote it down. “Do you … go by more than that, Spike?”

     He was certain she knew exactly who he was. That crack team of Watchers. That cellphone app. “Right, yes. William ‘Spike’ Pratt.”

     “Thank you. And is Ms. Hutchins here?”

     “She is, but she won’t be awake for another hour or so. Said she’d be up for the merry dancers. You … did you say she was  _expecting_  you?”

     Buffy tried to conceal her impatience. “Yes, we had an appointment to discuss — well, apparently she’s something of an expert in a matter relevant to a homicide investigation. And you, are the two of you related?”

     Maybe less than a crack team. “Yes! Yes, she’s my si-” The Slayer’s pen was poised, but it occurred to him that “sire” probably couldn’t go in the official record. Though he’d heard the Icelandic police were quite progressive. “Sister-in-law. Sort of my  _ex_  sister-in-law.”

     “Not a blood-relation, then, just housemates?”

     “Yes! No. Not blood-related. No, no blood.” Spike winced. He had never learned to lie well; he could get started, and then, even as the words continued, something in him just foundered. Lying was boring. “We’re … we share the kitchen, help each other. She’s my friend.”

     “I see. Uh – ‘merry dancers’?”

     “Northern lights.”

     “Oh.” Buffy smiled brightly at him. “Would it be possible to let her know I’m here?”

     Spike froze with indecision. The Slayer was acting entirely normal-like, but turning his back on her … then again, maybe she really just needed information for a police investigation. That could be true, couldn’t it? Her uniform, the I.D., it all looked real. Even if she didn’t know exactly who they were, she must still sense they were vampires, and he couldn’t see any reason she would let him go warn Dru if she was here for a death match. Maybe she’d survived this long by picking her battles with discretion. And these days, neither he nor Dru were drawing attention to themselves; the local community was just too small to run around eating killy-nilly. Maybe she was only here to send a little message, let them know she had her eye on them. In any case, warning Dru had to be better than not warning Dru. “Right then. I’ll be back.” He could only hope his smile wasn’t too ghastly.

     Buffy stood by the fireplace, pretending to look at the shelves of poetry while trying, with difficulty, to remember department policies that might specifically ban flirting in uniform. His look, with the black-painted fingernails and combat boots, wasn’t really her thing. Then again maybe it really, really was. Riley, her ex, might have been what she thought of as her type, but he had  _never_  triggered her mystical hottie detector. Which was still going nuts. Whatever Spike lacked in brains, he made up for by moving like a boneless, slinking cat. Although she should be concentrating on the Pantsless Man rather than getting anyone else pantsless, Buffy firmly believed in taking a balanced approach to life.

     Her train of thought was derailed as Spike burst back into the kitchen. “She’s been taken!”

     “What?”

     “Drusilla!” He was wild-eyed, but there was nothing dimwitted or hesitant about him now. “Window’s busted, a spell circle — blood. She’s been  _taken_. The room  _stinks_  of magic.”

     Spike wasn’t sure what he’d expected after he stumbled back into the kitchen, gasping with the dizzying aftereffects of whatever spell had been cast in Dru’s room: would the Slayer shrug and lecture him on the perils inherent in being Evil? Reveal herself as a mastermind, the kidnapper of Dru, and call in the cavalry to take him down?

     What actually happened was far less comprehensible. The Slayer made him sit down, and told him to take deep breaths; unreasonably, the familiar rhythm helped. The Slayer checked over the house with straightforward professionalism. The Slayer got on the radio with a dispatcher, using police lingo that conveyed almost nothing to Spike. The Slayer spoke very gently to him, and made him absolutely the most terrible cup of tea, while talking him through how he’d spent the day. In short order, a forensic team and constables were swarming the vampires’ house and yard, paying remarkably little attention to the double-headed axe and swords by the door, and thankfully not opening the fridge. The Slayer was insisting on jurisdiction with someone on that radio because of an earlier homicide — homicide? (Some part of him remembered that she had indeed been there to consult with Dru on a homicide, but it wasn’t until now he’d felt the force of the word, or considered that it could apply to  _family_.) Spike was being fingerprinted “for exclusion” and asked for more identifying papers and family details than he had ever in his long life actually possessed. When he snarled his answer, and seriously began to consider sinking his fangs into his interrogator so he could  _find Dru, do something, do anything_ , the Slayer intervened and headed the serious young constable off to some other task. Once something-or-other had been completed in Dru’s room, the Slayer had sat beside him and helped him clean the ink off his fingers; he’d started with the wipes he’d been handed, and then forgotten what he was doing. She’d carefully fit plastic booties over his boots; then, guiding him with the firm gentleness one might use for a high-strung horse, she’d led him back to Dru’s room. The broken window had been covered over from the outside with dark plastic, but he could see the muted movement of flashlights and the glare of squad car lights from outside through the film. The disorienting reek of magic from earlier had largely dissipated. Now he could focus. The Slayer asked him to stay where he was, just inside the door, but to look around carefully. A deputy in uniform, also in plastic coverings, was collecting something into a vial.

     He studied the room, taking in details he’d been too overwhelmed to notice earlier. The window had been smashed, both the catch and the frame damaged.   He could smell blood, but it wasn’t Dru’s and he couldn’t see where it was coming from. The vanity, with its collection of fragile dried flowers, twigs, and seedpods she’d collected from the woods was messy and cluttered, but normally so. He thought perhaps one of the dolls was gone, but he hadn’t spent a lot of time in Dru’s room the last couple of years and she remained capricious with her dollies, so the absence could be meaningless. A glimmering spell circle was just beside the bed. There were small, orange, plastic signs scattered around the room with numbers on them. The Slayer’s hand on his elbow was no doubt there to stop him from stepping further into the room, but both her manner and touch were reassuring. That was at least as unnatural as the magic.

     “When was the last time you saw her?”

     He thought. “Maybe five hours ago. But it’s been quiet till you got here. It’s a quiet place. I should have heard something, should have felt the mag–”

     “You can’t think that way. It’s an old house, I’m sure these stone walls absorb sound. Do you see anything else here that looks out of place?”

     “No. I mean, the sheets are a mess, and those number placards, and that circle, but no.”

     “About that circle: you already knew what it was. Do you share Drusilla’s interest in the occult?”

     Spike wondered if  _being_  occult counted as  _having_   _an interest_ in it — but if it did, she wouldn’t need to ask, would she? “No. I know it when I feel it, but I don’t muck about. That stuff has consequences.”

     Buffy paused. “Okay. So can you tell me anything about this?” The Slayer held a sealed baggie out to him with a sheet of paper inside. It had a stave drawn on it in something he was confident, even through the plastic, was blood.

     “Looks like a spell to me, but I don’t know more than that.”

     “All right. As far as you know, is Drusilla seeing anyone?”

     “Well, that barrow wight –”

     “Bar-low Wright,” said Buffy, writing in her notebook. “Another Englishman, I take it?”

     “Uh … ”

     “It’s just that it doesn’t sound Icelandic. Do you know how well they were getting along?”

     “… Well, I think. I think they were getting on well.” Spike nodded, mystified. The wight was almost certainly not English, was in fact no longer verbal in any language; but he was absolutely an unlikely abductor. As far as Spike could tell he was only semi-corporeal, and quite under Dru’s thumb.

     “We’ll let the officers finish up here. If you’d go back to the kitchen, I’ll be there with you in a minute. We’re going to get some contact info for this bar you were at earlier, a list of places and people she might go to; we’ll figure out where you’re going to stay, and what we’re going to do to monitor incoming calls.”

    

     When Buffy finally returned to Spike’s kitchen, she was surprised to find a baffled and sweaty Giles being halted at the door, awkwardly shifting a bag. “Giles! Did you decide to join us?   I’m afraid the meeting you arranged is — well, it’s necessarily delayed. Here, let him through; Giles, come in and have a seat here, out of the way.”

     Giles passed between the two constables who had been blocking his path, looking ashen. “Inspector Summers. When I saw the flashing lights I was terribly worried.”

     “Mr. Pratt, this is my associate, Mr. Giles, from the Museum. The man who arranged the meeting with Ms. Hutchins for me. Giles, there’s a situation. I’d like you to both wait here for a moment while I take care of a couple more things.” Buffy was all efficiency as she maneuvered Giles onto the same bench behind the table as Spike, and moved past them to the door, speaking to one of the constables for a moment before getting back on the radio.

     Giles considered the man he was sitting next to: very pale, very like his photo from almost 70 years prior, and somehow capable of projecting absolute physical ease even as he glowered and fidgeted. “William the Bloody?” he said, in a conversational tone pitched low to avoid drawing interest from the investigation still proceeding around them. “I believe I was just reading about you.”

     “Watcher,” Spike all but spat, “am I to understand you suggested your Slayer consult with Dru? Odd choice. Particularly since I don’t believe you actually called to set up a meeting.” He had matched Giles’ subdued volume, but his tone was chilling. “Just wanted the Slayer to meet my sire?”

     “Ah. Yes, well, when you put it like that ...” Giles shifted a bit, drawing his bag up closer and letting his hand rest inside. “I can see what it looks like, but it’s not quite that simple.”

     “What’s that? More her own doing, then? She’s an independent thinker?”

     “In a manner of speaking.” Giles removed his glasses and studied them. He felt almost relaxed, despite the fact he was sitting next to one of the deadliest creatures listed in his library. Maybe that was an effect of vampire proximity not mentioned in his books? Or perhaps it was the police filling the kitchen. “She doesn’t believe in Watchers.”

     Spike tried to reconcile this with the Slayer’s age. “So she’s some sort of free agent and you just, what, check in from time to time?”

     “Yes, well, no — yes —  _very_  free. She doesn’t believe you even exist.”

     “She knows I exist. She wrote down my name, Watcher. She made me a cup of tea. Horrible; no idea about tea.”

     Giles sighed, and put his glasses back on so he could see Spike’s face. “Think bigger. When I say she doesn’t believe, I don’t mean she doesn’t trust the Council and so goes her own way. She doesn’t think there is a supernatural world. She doesn’t accept either that she’s  _the_  Slayer, or that there is such a thing as  _a_  Slayer. Or that spells are a functioning technology. Or that the Council is an actual group that serves a purpose, or that there are —”

     “The occult.” Spike sounded strained, but marginally less hostile. “She asked me if I had an interest in the occult. Like the supernatural might be my fucking hobby.”

     “Exactly. When the Council first sent a Watcher, she … thought he was trying to ‘groom’ her for something unsavory. He went to prison, apparently.” Giles’ voice was thin.

     “Well,” said Spike, recovering his equilibrium. “I’ve wondered about Watchers myself. Middle-aged wankers in a position of power over a pre-teen girl – I’d say she’s right smart. But you’re here now. Why haven’t you taught her?”

     “I met her yesterday, in the course of her investigation. The Council had no idea where the Chosen One was. And I  _did_  send her here. It’s a time-honored tradition to –” Spike snorted. Giles glared, realizing his volume had risen as he defended actions he regretted so deeply that he’d come — well, he’d come rushing out to sit in a vampire’s kitchen trying to conceal his crossbow. Though Buffy was manifestly capable of turning the blindest of eyes to the mystical, it wasn’t entirely clear what would happen if Giles battled a supernatural creature in front of a whole crew of policemen. Someone might take notice.

     A constable approached them, looking back as Buffy reentered the house to ask her something; she answered him intently. Spike lost track of his conversation as he watched her. He felt an unfamiliar response inside him; he  _recognized_  something in her face. Focused and bright, she had the light of the hunt in her eyes. A bobby pin was edging loose from her hair. She might not believe in Slayers — as soon as Giles had said it, that fact had made sense out of much of the confusion of the evening — but at her central core, that was what she was: a Slayer, a huntress. In some way, he and she were the same.

     That recognition settled something. A witch had taken Dru by magic. He’d felt the arcane disorientation of the spell working against his own undead flesh, a dislocation of his will from his body, still potent even well after the caster was gone. The humans around him had experienced nothing. To stand a chance of helping Dru, he was going to have to work with someone who was not susceptible, someone living. This woman before him, called upon by destiny and fate to kill his kind, believed it was her job to find and save Dru. He was going to make nice with this Slayer, at least for the time being. He forgot the irritating Watcher and constables entirely as a whole lock of her hair slipped free.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A very brief history of Icelandic crosses that pose as crucifixes but aren’t: https://thornews.com/2014/03/17/thors-hammers-disguised-as-crucifixes/ I suppose a Thor’s hammer pendant might be just as effective as a Christian one if your vampire follows the Norse gods. As for why Giles wouldn’t have known his gift wouldn’t help Buffy, well — these crosses are sold in sight-seeing stops and museums all over Iceland, and I presume he just thought of it as a potentially handy part of the gift shop inventory.
> 
> If you don’t know who PJ Harvey is, trust me: we’d all like to be exactly that cool when our hottie detectors go off. I know I've seen a photo shoot of her in a military-ish jacket that made me think of her when Buffy needed a reference, but I can't find it right now online. Here, have a lovely, juicy song instead: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AF3H-cG-sk4
> 
> Before going to Iceland, I had originally written this with Spike living in a sod-roofed house. They look so very romantic in photos. But then I went, and I can see why Icelanders don’t particularly want to preserve that part of their heritage. They’re cute on the outside, with their false wooden fronts; but it must have been like living in a cold, damp root cellar. Practical, for a poverty-striken land with little timber, but not enviable. And probably not something Spike would house Dru in. Now they build a lot of handsome houses with vertically corrugated metal siding and steeply peaked roofs, often in dark colors with white trim.
> 
> And belatedly, because I always forget a note: here's great little bit on "willy-nilly," first recorded around the year 1000: http://www.phrases.org.uk/meanings/willy-nilly.html


	5. The Pursuit

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Today I give thanks for Gort, who beta'd this over her coffee on Thanksgiving day.  
> Happy Thanksgiving to all of you who celebrate, happy anti-colonialization to those who don't, and happy Pangs viewing to all!

     Buffy studied the photograph of Drusilla. A beautiful woman, with something unique and assured about her gaze. Buffy tried to shake the odd notion that Drusilla had looked up into the camera lens in the past directly into this moment, her eyes meeting Buffy’s through the photo. Drusilla was dressed in a white flowing dress with a high waist. The photo had an old feel to it, as though the fibers of the paper had relaxed over time, but Spike had assured her it was current.

     The constables had packed up their gear. The techs had installed a switch to engage a police line if a ransom call came in, and most of the squad cars were gone. It was time for Buffy to go home. She approached Spike and Giles, still sitting together on the kitchen bench. “I think we’re about wrapped up here for the night.”

     “You think that?” said Spike. “No. You need to tell me what’s going on.”

     Buffy sighed. “You know most of what we know –”

     “No, I don’t. What was the homicide you were here to talk to Dru about?   Is this related? Bloody hell, did you bring this here with you?”

     Buffy overrode him with the authority in her voice, though she wasn’t yelling. “This didn’t happen after I arrived. It does appear that this abduction could be related to another crime, but we won’t know more until we get some forensic answers.”

     “You said a homicide.”

     “A homicide. Yes. Earlier this week in Glaumbær, a man was found dead in a circle made of a substance very like the circle in Ms. Hutchins’ room. If nothing else, it’s a striking coincidence.”

     Spike studied her. “And the questions about necropants?”

     Buffy pulled out a chair and sat down across from the two of them at the narrow table. “The victim was halfway skinned. But the idea of necropants, attempted sorcery — that is just one theory we are pursuing.”

     “Because there are so many reasons to skin a man from the waist down?”

     “As I understand it, there were some inconsistencies between what happened in Glaumbær and the correct procedures for making necropants; so yes, it may have been something else.” Under the circumstances, Buffy thought she’d avoid mentioning torture. “I don’t know what. And it may end up being unrelated to the abduction of your ex-sister-in-law, although frankly the spell circles worry me.”

     Spike rose. “Let’s go.”

     Buffy frowned. “Really, you should try to get some rest, and keep your phone ringer turned on in case someone contacts you. And we should leave, we’ve disrupted and tramped all over your home for quite long enough.”

     “Sod that. We’re going to go look for her. Right now. She was taken through that window, and we’re going to go get her back.”

     “Mr. Pratt, I must assure you —”

     Giles cleared his throat. “Ehem, Buffy – Inspector Summers. Perhaps if we were just to show Mr. Pratt here the extent of the investigation outside, he’d see … that there’s no trail to follow? To, ah, demonstrate that the investigation is well in hand.”

     Spike had turned towards Giles as he spoke, head tilted. Buffy considered the two men. “Okay,” she said decisively.

     Spike looked back at her. “Okay?”

     “Okay, we’ll do a quick walk outside. But that’s all. Mr. Pratt, I realize this is incredibly distressing. And Giles, you’re as close to an expert on magic as I have, so you’re coming with us. We will take a look for anything a standard forensics team might have missed. But then we are shutting down. You, Mr. Pratt, need to rest; if you don’t think you can do it here under the circumstances, we’ll find somewhere else for you to stay. And you, Giles — well, it turns out to be a useful thing you decided to join us, but I’m sure you need to get home as well. I’ll be back in just a moment. I’m going to get the flashlight out of my car.”

     As the door shut after Buffy, Spike looked sidelong at Giles. “You’re helping. Why?”

     “I’m helping Buffy. As far as Drusilla goes, the detectives won’t have been looking for magical clues, so there are practical reasons we should take a look now. But if you’re asking a larger question, the answer is this: I want Buffy to accept who she is. And I don’t particularly want to end up in prison or some psychiatric hospital. You want Drusilla back. A magical abduction — this could be the bridge that makes Buffy see the truth. But you and I, we’ll have to do the supernatural detective work, at least at first. Do you agree?”

     “Don’t much care for Watchers. Twitchy lot.”

     “Maybe so, but you haven’t tried to kill either of us … yet, and you’re asking the Slayer for help. We could both get what we want out of this.”

     “And after?”

     “Ah. I suggest we agree to negotiate the end of the truce. No sudden attacks from either side.”

     The door opened again, revealing Buffy with a large flashlight. “Mr. Pratt?” she asked. Giles stood, quietly loosening the cross-bow within the duffle bag. Spike grabbed his leather coat off the peg by the door, and reached for the double-headed battle axe that had been leaning up behind it. “Mr. Pratt.” Buffy sounded reproving, and he hesitated. “Don’t you have a winter coat? It’s cold out there.”   Spike heard a stifled snort behind him as he shifted the axe to a less conspicuous position.

     “’S okay. I’ll be fine. Lead on now, Sla- Inspector.”

     Outside, they followed the darkened path through the snow where constables had muddied it tromping back and forth around the corner to Dru’s window. The window was covered, but enough light came through from inside to show that if there had been tracks away from the house, blowing snow had obliterated them.

     Spike shouldered past Giles to catch up with Buffy. The two of them approached the window, Buffy shining her flashlight across the busted frame and the snow below. Spike leaned close, but the scents from the police had obscured anything that might have been there earlier.

     “Who —  _what i_ s that?” Giles spoke from behind them in such a stilted, intense tone they both turned. Giles was staring towards the edge of the woods. “I don’t think that’s human,” said Giles.

     “Is that Drusilla?” said Buffy, peering across the lawn. Spike could see the resemblance: dark hair loose and tumbling around a smear of a white face; rail-thin body clothed in a pale gown that moved around her. But there was something very wrong. It was hard to keep looking at her — hard because it was dark, but also just hard to focus, even though she was a bare twenty feet away. Something in the way the woman’s head was resting on her body, the angle of her shoulders, the random lengths of her twiggy fingers.

     Spike took a couple steps towards the pale figure and stopped, shuddering, hit by a wave of malevolence. It had the same dark signature that had been in Dru’s room. “That’s not Dru. It looks something like her, but that’s not – ’S nothing I recognize.” He shook his head; he couldn’t hear the thing breathing, couldn’t smell anything but the trees and fresh snow ahead. He tightened his grip on the axe.

     “Well, then,” said Buffy brightly. “Let’s ask her.” She strode forward past him, raising the beam of her flashlight to shine directly in the figure’s face. The eyes were just shadowed hollows, even directly in the torch’s beam. “This is Inspector Summers of the Reykjavik Police. You are at a crime scene. Please –  _Hey!”_  The figure was suddenly moving rapidly away from them, with a jerking, angular motion as though under the flowing dress her legs were jointed too many times. “Stop!” Buffy broke into a run, plunging into the trees after her.

     Spike stumbled into the trees close behind, his eyes shifting yellow and his face ridging as he tried to shake off the residual drag of magic. Behind him, he could hear Giles struggling with his bag. “William, stay with Buffy! I’m coming!”  

 

    

     Buffy didn’t know how long she’d been running. It seemed as though she’d been struggling forever through tangled branches and undergrowth, glimpses of her quarry flitting ahead as smoothly as though there were no obstacles in the pathless woods. She knew Spike was close, could hear him and feel him on the back of her neck, and she imagined she could distinguish a more distant cracking and splintering as Giles forced his way – but her focus was ahead, on the flashes of cloth that kept whipping out of view. She’d dropped the flashlight at some point. Then there was the beginning of light ahead, the flickering glow of fire.

     Buffy slowed as she realized she was coming to the edge of a clearing – the trees now silhouetted against a small bonfire. She could hear an indistinct, sing-song voice. She felt Spike draw close behind her, also slowing. “Don’t like this, pet. Feels wrong,” he said softly. She tried to step more quietly, and pulled her billy club out of its loop. He moved out to her left. Between them and the fire swayed a woman, but not the one they’d been chasing – a short figure with arms raised, her movements timed with the rhythm of her voice.

     Buffy shifted her weight forward and a branch she hadn’t seen underfoot let out a resounding crack. The woman whirled, black against the orange flame; she called out. Out of the trees surrounding them, the deadwood and the tangled undergrowth, there was a flurry of fluttering movements. Stick and leaf and vine began to rise up, piecing together to form sets of feet and legs, and then torsos, parts tumbling upwards into spindly arms and necks, thickening with leaf-mold and bark. Twigs rushed into hands, heads filled out from the center. The most complete body began to lurch towards them as its legs became whole, and all of them were moving now, six, eight, perhaps more than a dozen – “Back to back, now, Slayer,” breathed Spike, and she felt him behind her, saw the glint of his axe out of the corner of her eye.  

     “Let’s get out of the woods, closer to the fire,” said Buffy, jabbing at the creature between her and the clearing edge. The billy stick passed through the accretion of objects that made up the figure effortlessly, and they refilled the form like water – but it did stagger back a step. Buffy and Spike shifted slowly into the clearing. The things moved with them, gaining clarity of form as lichen and moss and snow smoothed into their crevices, created the illusion of bodies covered in cloth, vaguely familiar white faces with gaping mouths and holes for eyes. “We don’t want trouble,” announced Buffy loudly.

     Spike laughed, his genuine amusement jarring. “Not a gang of hoodlums, luv. And I’m thinking English may not be their native tongue. These ones over here? They don’t even have ears yet.” He suddenly cracked his axe into the nearest one, getting a satisfying shattering sound as the disturbing, incomplete head separated from the neck. “Think they’re solid enough to fight with now.”

     The creatures moved in, and Buffy found herself instinctively, fluidly on the offensive. She could hear axe blows behind her. When one of the creatures reached for her, her billy club hit its forearms with a crisp thwack. One wrist fractured, the fingers wriggling even as they separated into their original components. Spike’s movements flickered in her peripheral vision. And then the fight became a blur as the creatures came faster, faces calm and seemingly untroubled as she splintered their newly formed parts off again. She clubbed and jabbed, shards of plant matter hitting her in the face.

     When there was nothing left to fight in front of her, she whirled to find Spike half-leaning on his axe and watching her, almost absently gripping one of the figures. Even armless, with its head half gone, it continued to try to walk towards him. The back of the figure was hollow.  

     “What is that?” said an exhausted Giles, limping toward them from the edge of the trees. “I thought I heard a struggle.”

     Spike looked at him. “Here, take it. Give it a good look-see.” He swung the armless body around and tossed it at Giles, who caught it and flailed in panic when he realized it was animate. He and the figure crashed backwards into the trees.

     Spike turned back to Buffy. “You’re bleeding.”   He stepped close as she stared at his yellow eyes in the flickering light of the fire. He put his hands on her cheeks and very, very carefully turned her head to the side; then he licked the cut above her eye. He shut his eyes.

     Buffy froze at the sensation; then she started to laugh.

     “Ruining the moment, here, pet. What’s so funny?”

     “We’re high,” said Buffy. “We’ve eaten something, or been injected with something, or … or we were gassed.” She laughed again, less hysterically but more amused, and lifted her hand to feel his brow ridges. “And you’re a Klingon. Why would I see you as a Klingon _?_  I don’t even like science fiction.”

     Giles blundered back into the clearing, still struggling to aim his crossbow one-handed without losing his grip on the shoulder of the scrabbling half-creature. Spike sighed and stepped back from Buffy, picked up the axe, and split the thing’s torso in two with a measured blow. “At least these things are brittle. Any ideas about what they are, Watcher?”

     Giles took a moment to right his glasses and clear his throat. He took on a scholarly tone, as though he hadn’t just slogged through a dark forest in a panic, filling his best shoes with snow, and then had a partial woodsy woman-creature tossed at him by an infamous vampire. “Well, erm, I would guess something related to the … eh … ellepiger? Though I had always believed them to be solid wood; more like animate puppets hollowed out from the back. Or perhaps a golem of some specialized kind, a woodland golem. And then there was, er, Blodeuwedd. She was woman made from flowers who might have been a minor animist goddess, similar in that she was also obviously accretionary in nature … but I don’t think she ever appeared in multiples. Besides,” and here he poked at the disabled torso with his sodden shoe, “she was local to Wales.”

     “Giles, we’ve been drugged,” said Buffy, censoriously. “We can’t have just fought accretion-whatsit thingeys out of folklore. Thingeys out of folklore don’t exist.”

     “For Christ’s sake, love,” said Spike, staring at her in full fang-face.

     “It’s the only explanation. Once you eliminate the impossible — and these ellipses girls are  _obviously_  impossible — whatever remains, no matter how unlikely, has to be true. Right? And you — you can’t be a Klingon because Klingons are fictional, and I know that’s not what your forehead looks like. I don’t see how anything explains this except something along the lines of LSD.”

     “Have you ever taken LSD, Buffy?” Giles sounded tired.

     “Oh, right. We were drugged, and that all didn’t just happen. That’s why we  _all saw it_ ,” said Spike dismissively. “And ’m much better looking than a Klingon. Where’d the witch go?”

     Giles continued, “Generally speaking, LSD is more of a ‘the rust is so beautiful, I’m at one with the rust’ experience than a ‘we all see the same demons and go to war against them with axes’ experience.” He swiveled to look at Spike. “Did you say ‘witch’? Which – what witch?”

     “Was a woman here with the fire, chanting. I think she summoned the ellepiger when she saw us coming.” Spike picked up his axe and walked toward the fire, which was dwindling, and poked around where the chanting woman had stood. He braced himself for a wave of disorientation, but it was minimal. He sniffed. “Dru was here. Dru, or something of Dru’s. I can smell her. And that was the same witch that did the spell in Dru’s room. She must have left that ellepiger by the house as a sentry.”

 

    

     Spike led them back to the house, maintaining his game face in the darkness until they reached the yard. He poured whisky into three mismatched glasses on the table. Buffy stared doubtfully at hers, absently combing bits of lichen out of her hair with her fingers. “I’m not sure another mind-altering substance is what I need right now. Spike, you definitely recognized Dru’s perfume?”

     “She’d been there.” Her cut was already healing, and just looking at it made his fingers twitch.

     “I’m not sure I could tell a crew how to get out to that clearing. If I come back in the daylight tomorrow, could you lead me back there?”

     “Klingons aren’t available during the daylight hours,” said Spike blandly. Giles coughed into his whiskey. “But you bring back a couple of big torches around dusk, we’ll go together then.”

     “Okay. We’re going to find her, Spike.”

     Spike allowed himself reach out and pull a bit of leaf out of her entirely mussed hair. “We will.”

 

    

     As Buffy headed to her car, Giles lingered. “Do we have a deal, William? We work together to find Dru, and no surprises as to when or how this truce ends?”

     “I don’t intend to hurt Buffy,” said Spike. He stood up, backing away slowly from the table, then looked directly at Giles, abject horror on his face. “Oh, bloody hell.” He spun on his heel and bolted out the door.

     Giles finished his whiskey, and considered the empty glass for a long moment. All his years of Watcher training and demon research felt incredibly inadequate.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey! I made a banner! My iphone helpfully reports that I took the background shot in Sveitarfélagið Hornafjörður, which I cannot pronounce. (This banner available at Elysian Fields, http://dark-solace.org/elysian/viewstory.php?sid=5172)
> 
> This chapter reveals a big flaw in my idiosyncratic preparation for going to Iceland. I read a couple modern crime novels set there, and some folklore (because I really needed to know about the local monsters before I went); but I really was more intrigued by the saga-age works … which meant I read about all the trees that were there around 800 A.D. I didn’t realize that those forests lasted only until the Vikings cut them all down to build farms. Then life got really hard in the Land of No Trees, what with nothing left to burn in the extreme cold and occasional deluges of poisonous volcano chemicals. There’ve been ongoing reforestation projects for a while, trying to identify species that can grow there, and to shift the sheep-culture into one not so damaging to saplings. There are even some tall trees where the efforts met with early success.
> 
> Interestingly, Icelanders are not necessarily in favor of reforestation. They like their sheep, and some of them feel uneasy with the way forests obscure the ground – one notably-worded complaint was that with trees, “you can’t see the bones of the land.”
> 
> So to get back to my story flaw: there are some patches of pine trees up North, but probably not the thick, tangled woods I describe.
> 
> Also, Giles pretty much tells you everything I know about the ellepiger, aka alder-tree girls. They were sort of siren-y, beautiful tree women who lured men into the woods, never to return, or to dance to death, or to return not quite right in the head. As far as I know, they weren’t made up of little twiggy stuff and moss and their faces weren’t incomplete … but hey, folklore is often sketchy on the details. Those things probably just got left out. There’s a lovely, archaic, free e-book on Nordic folktales that describes them here (and explains that they always wear white, and that their backs “are hollow like a dough-trough”): https://books.google.com/books?id=hGsKAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false


	6. The Usual Suspects

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Beta Gort!
> 
> I have a t-shirt somewhere drawn by the late Gene Greif, a very fine illustrator, which says: “Art is Hard” and shows the artist poking himself in the eye. That’s kind of how this chapter felt. I’m so very impressed with y’all who write multiple stories.

     Spike and Buffy moved through the woods more or less side by side, their torches on high even though there was still some light in the sky. It was easy to retrace their path from the night before; they had pursued the ellepiger without any attempt to spare the vegetation. It struck Spike that beyond their own movements, there were no sounds other than water: melting ice dripping off a myriad of branches; a small waterfall rushing louder as they approached and then dwindling as they passed; a wandering stream trickling through the roots of trees. The only signs of passage in the snow apart from their own were bird tracks and the delicate paired prints of wild mink.

     They were silent. Spike was still absorbing Buffy’s news about the case: the blood used to paint the stave left behind at his house was the Pantsless Man’s blood. The sand used in the spell circles from the Pantsless Man and Dru’s bedroom was a match. And Giles had determined that the stave was part of a spell intended to summon the dead.

     Spike wasn’t fond of magic in general – unreliable and dangerous. But the thought of necromancy filled him with sharp dismay. Presumably, whoever had worked it had taken control of Dru, at least temporarily. Dru was still alive; he could feel the sire bond intact, the steady baseline beat of family that anchored his deepest sense of self.  He had felt it every waking moment for over a century, and it had probably also been there as he slept, pulsing away in his dreams. He suspected that the reason he was not insane with worry, knowing she could be at risk, was that he could not genuinely conceive of a reality in which that bond was absent.

     Even twenty years ago, he never would have believed he’d be okay if Dru moved on; but in a lot of ways their relationship was more stable and more mutual than it had ever been. Some of it was the energy from the hellmouth at Krafla, and the multiple mini-hellmouths spotting the landscape – a few with relaxing geo-thermal springs (pure genius, that, and popular among humans and demons alike). The demonic energy had healed her physically; unexpectedly, it had also done something to repair the imbalance of her mind. She would always be a seer who conversed with the stars and had a fondness for torture; but she was far more intelligible these days, and also far more kind. She still took her childe’s devotion for granted. But then she could, couldn’t she? He loved her. And now she was able to show some genuine affection in return. It was either perverse or poetic that being trapped together indoors through the long summer months, when the sun dipped below the horizon a scant hour or less, in a country too sparsely populated and crime-free to feed freely, their lives had become peaceful. Peace was not even something he’d known he  _could_  enjoy as a vampire. And if he was a little lonely, now that winter was here and she was often off and about without him – on the other hand he was avidly reading and scrawling poetry for the first time in over a century.

   “That coat is really not warm enough for winter,” said Buffy, jolting him out of his musings. He looked sidelong at her and kept walking. She might be in denial about the ellepiger … and him … and herself; but she hadn’t said a word when it became obvious he was bringing along the battle axe. Something was getting through. And she’d worn her hair loose tonight, and the boots. “Really, it looks good, but you’re going to get frostbite.”

     “Like my coat do you, Slayer?” He let his tongue rest behind his teeth.

     She flushed deliciously, looking away; then her eyes pivoted back to him, searching. An orange glow was flickering across her face. “Why do you keep calling me that?”

     Balls. “I, uh … wait a minute. Is that another bonfire?” He turned and squinted ahead through the trees. “Is this witch completely nutters, coming back two nights running?”

     This time there was no chanting, just the restless random crackling of a fire. Buffy stepped closer to him with her finger to her lips and they moved forward cautiously the last thirty feet, just to the edge of the clearing.

     “Oh,  _do_  come into the light. I thought you’d never get here. And I have something for you.” The voice that called out was playful, with a slight Icelandic accent. It came from a slim man crouching comfortably on a stump by the reignited fire, his forearms resting on his thighs. His hair was long and lank, falling past his shoulders. The flames cast shadows upwards across his handsome, broad face. “Something a little bit rare and a little bit special, to make you realize how rare and special you really are.”

     Buffy drew herself up. This spooky nonsense with the cartoonish lighting that just screamed “sinister” – it was absurd. She held up her badge and marched forward. “This – this is Inspector Summers of –”

     “Oh, I already know who you are; I know who you are better than  _you_  do, Buffy Summers.” The intimacy in his soft voice, with its strange cadences, somehow entirely overpowered her brash one. He smiled, and the muscles along Buffy’s spine tightened at the chill in it.

     In the darkness behind the crouching man, a large figure with a gaping mouth shambled a few steps forward, its face moving haphazardly as though scenting the air like a hound. There was dark, glossy blood across its chin, down its tattered clothing, and its mouth was working mutely around sharp teeth. Even in the limited light, its skin was clearly a deep, ashy blue. Spike stepped forward beside her: “Slayer, be careful, I think that’s a –”

     “I’ve got this,” snapped Buffy. “Stay back, Spike.” She undid the safety catch on her pepper spray.

     “You can’t say I didn’t warn you,” said the crouching man melodically. “Over and over. But that busy, busy bee brain of yours has been glossing right over my more subtle hints – you’ve been ignoring both the messengers and the message, haven’t you, Buffy?  The cat, the raven, the cliché of the bat … the midge face. Tell me, how do you explain that one to yourself when you’re alone in the dark?

     “I was trying to be more atmospheric _,_ more _artistic_ than this. To let you follow the clues to the answer, like your detective persona – make it a kind of a win-win for your twin halves. But you: too besotted with slotting details into a pre-ordained framework to step back and consider a paradigm shift.” The blue shambler moved in front of the crouching man, its head still questing, and began to shuffle toward Buffy. “I regret that I’ve had to take a more direct approach – I realize it’s all rather crude – but  _this is important_.” The last part lashed out like a long, snakey tongue.

     Spike’s eyes were wide as he tapped her arm and offered her his axe. “Buffy, take this, I think you might need –”

     “I can’t hack at an unarmed suspect with an axe,” said Buffy, irritated. “Really, if you would please move back a little, we’ll both be safer.”  

     “Right,” said Spike dubiously, backing away as the thing continued forward.

     “I’m an officer of the Reykjavik Police. Please hold still and put your hands up and – stop that!” The shambler had reached for her, long sharp fingernails swiping at her arm, snagging at her coat. “Ever hear of a manicure? You should really look into one. Those nails of yours could spread disease.” It reared back and then lunged at her clumsily; she sprayed mace directly into its eyes.

     The thing let out a two-toned bellow, and with it a rank, rotten blast of air. It began to grow, bloating, stretching, rearing back as it became seven, then eight feet tall. “Buffy!” yelled Spike. Buffy struck out with her billy club; the head of the club cracked and splintered away. She felt as though she had hit an anvil with all her might, reverberations traveling up the bone of her arm. The thing, now easily nine feet tall, swung at her, its fist catching her in the shoulder. She was flung back through the air, hitting a tree trunk with a crack as it continued lumbering toward her.

     With a shout, Spike charged at it from behind, savagely bringing his axe down in the middle of the thing’s back. The axe bounced off, his arms rattling from the force, but it was enough to make the creature half turn – its huge, fisted arm sent him flying onto his back in the clearing, nearly into the fire itself.

     As Buffy struggled back to her feet, the thing turned and reached for her again. Spike launched himself forward, this time using all his momentum and the full length of the axe to swing the axe’s handle into the back of the thing’s knees. It let out an awful, animal roar as it fell forward toward Buffy, mouth stretching obscenely, aiming the grim circle of its teeth at Buffy’s neck.

     Without thought, Buffy braced the remains of her billy club with both arms, legs staunch. The force of the creature’s fall brought it down directly on the club, and she was crushed – but no, she wasn’t crushed. The creature was gone. She was covered in a gritty, putrid dust that powdered down around her, heavy, clumping, defiling the snow. She stood still, gasping, splintered club erect, and slowly turned her head to look at Spike.

     The man on the stump started a slow clap. Buffy glowered, wiping at the foul dust on her mouth.

     Spike winced as he tried to straighten up. “Draugr? I never met one before.” The man, still entirely relaxed, had adopted a look of mild amusement. “Not much for conversation, was it. And you – who might you be?”

     The man rose, and suddenly he was just behind Buffy, a hand curving around her to come to rest on her shoulder and pull her close, so close his lips nearly touched her ear. “Who am I? Buffy knows me, doesn’t she?” He peered around at her face as she stood stock still, gripping the shattered club. “You do, you know. You always have. Just as you have always known yourself, somewhere deep down, even though you’ve been hiding; just as you knew how to kill our undead friend.

     “Though these days, at least some of the time the self I know myself to be  _fades_  a little, if you will; my rich brew of ego and intent – it flattens out, becomes a bland and pallid evil, loses focus. These periods of affliction are most … unpleasant _._ Most problematic. And they’re getting longer. It’s why I’ve been trying to get through to you – this abandonment of your destiny just can’t stand. You’re eating away at the depths of the world with your shallowness, bringing the valleys up and the heights down.” Buffy didn’t like the way his voice seemed almost to exist inside her head – so fluid and so slippery. He released his hold on her and moved behind Spike, but his voice stayed right there in her skull, whispering across her thoughts.

     “Oh, Buffy; Buffy. A hero is only as meaningful as the opponent she battles. Being a hero, Buffy, with all of a hero’s stark limitations, you may not appreciate that the converse is also true: a monster can only be as significant, his darkness only as meaningful, as the good he opposes. An ensnarer of souls like me may be terrifying, malignancy made corporeal, creeping through your mind like an oil slick of corruption – but what happens when there are no more deep souls to consume? What happens when all there is to corrupt is the validity of social compatibility stats and parking tickets?

     “The world is changing, and you’re cheapening yourself right along with it, aren’t you, Buffy.   You’ve hidden what you are right down, down so deep in your core that you yourself can’t find it – Joan of Arc, giving up her sword of righteous fire for a meter maid’s notepad, and then celebrating the percentage of recycled paper! You are making  _me_  … silly with your silliness. And that, that I can’t abide.”

     He shifted his attention, and suddenly he was beside Spike. “And you, you Slayer of Slayers – surely  _you_  know my name. But maybe not – what are you now but a neutered puppy, with a faint love-sick stink, unable to rampage and slaughter and drink your fill due to considerations you’d have laughed off in the days of Nikki Wood. Safety? Caution? You’re a mirage version of yourself, a vampire heat haze with nothing underneath. Maybe your demon will flat-out give it up and depart, pack a bag and leave little Willie behind – trembling, scared, disgusted by his own fangs and appetite. Next thing you know, you’ll be out seeking the trivialization of a soul to bind you to the most superficial strictures, as though a rule book could possibly contain all your fury, all your heat, all your heart.” Now that he had moved away, Buffy could see firelight reflecting off the man’s black, cloven hooves.

     “That dislocation you felt? The stench of necromancy unweaving your body from your will? She’s not even that strong a witch, you know — you only felt it at all because the world doesn’t have enough breadth to contain the mojo of a true Big Bad if there’s no Big Good. You’re just a little bad now, sweet little Willie. All of us are diminished.”

     Buffy licked her lips. “You leave him alone. You say you want me to see who I am? I know who I am.”

     He turned back to her. “Tell me, Buffy Summers, who are you? You, you one girl in all the world, you who just out of the starting gate knew on instinct how to kill a draugr that’s stalked mankind for seven centuries – who are you?”

     Buffy’s temper flared. “I’m Inspector Summers of the Reykjavik Precinct—” But the man was no longer where her shard of billy club was aimed, and she swung straight on through to hit Spike in the abdomen.

     “Oi! Be careful! That’s sharp wood!”

     “Oh, blah, blah,  _blah_. Should I summon up the true Spike for you, Buffy Summers? What would make you see your own true self?”

     Spike felt something begin to alter in the deepest recesses of his being.   He knew this feeling. It was as delicious as Buffy blushing, an almost physical sensation as the demon swamped his intellect with unalloyed hunger. As a fledging, he’d gone years submerged in that particular voluptuousness. He looked at the Slayer, all trusting, felt her pulse pounding, and his fangs began to slide downward. His eyes riveted to her throat like iron filaments pointing to a magnet.

     Spike forced his eyes closed and thought of Buffy steadying him by making him take deep breaths in his kitchen. He took one. There weren’t so many creatures around who could toy with an old vampire like this, calling out the raw demon. And he didn’t much like the idea of being used as a dolly by anyone, cloven-hooved or no. Maybe the man’s monologue had revealed more than meant to let slip. “Making me ssilly with your ssilliness,” he muttered, his voice thick around his fangs. Then louder, “Fanden – that’s who you are, isn’t it? I  _do_  know you. Heard of you, at least. Tell you what. You answer a question, then Buffy’ll answer one, back and forth. Buffy loses, well – you throw another monster at her. You throw me at her. You lose, you leave her alone. Deal?”

     Buffy looked at him and gave her head a shake, confused. The hoofed man with his dripping voice was back on the stump, utterly relaxed and smiling, as though he had never moved from his easy crouch. “You can’t win against me, William and Buffy. I know you too well, and you only just know my name. I’ll play your game. Answer for answer.”

     “Silly,” whispered Spike. It was becoming easier to speak as he went. “Buffy, what kind of nail polish would you have picked out for the draugr? When you suggested a manicure? Black, like mine?”

     Buffy choked out an incredulous laugh. “ _What?_ ”

     Spike turned towards her. “Maybe a sparkly purple? What do  _you_  think, devil?” He waved vaguely towards the figure on the stump. “Or wait. Do you have a preference for varnish remover? The type with acetone, or the type with aloe vera? Which is better?”

     Something passed across the man’s face; he looked a little lost. Spike shook off the fangs and got chatty. “Go for the whole punk thing, myself, you know. So the chipping and the cracking – it’s all fine by me. Completes the look. Black’s probably fine with the draugr as well. My girl here, though, she’s all gorgeous and professional. She’d need to get the old all off before it could be reapplied, don’t you think, Fanden?”

     The man shifted uncomfortably on the stump, off balance; was this his question? This couldn’t be part of the game, could it? Buffy was frowning, but she made an effort to pitch in: “French. I think that – that  _thing_  needed a French manicure; shell-pink and white. That’s a classic, you can’t go wrong. And you should always get the remover with the moisturizer in it.”

     Fanden’s expression had become grasping, almost eager; his head tilted. “Moisturizer? Is that better? He was undead, you know, can it possibly matter?”

     “Don’t doubt it, little devil. My skin may not crack in the cold, but the draugr looked to be a bit different – not the same sort of healing, I’ll wager. More the type to decay over time. Do you know if draugr ever use moisturizer? That’ll be your question, since she answered the first one for you.”

     Fanden’s face was bewildered as he tried to answer, searching, searching his brain for the information. He knew he had to answer, but he couldn’t remember why, or who he was – why was he playing this game with these people? Were they friends?

     “Devil,” said Spike. “You need to go find out the answer, right? We’ll give you a head start.”

     “Yes – yes, I have to find out. I know where to go, too, there’s a draugr in Eastfjords. I’m sorry – I’m sorry, but I have to go. I have to go.   I’m sorry – what is my name? Do you know my name?” He looked at them plaintively, his voice now just a normal tenor voice.

     “Go find the answer. Take as long as you need,” said Spike gently. He was beginning to feel how battered he was from the draugr, but he couldn’t help it: he had a soft spot for agents of chaos. And while he hadn’t much liked what Fanden had to say, it had been rather … poetic.

     Fanden rose up, standing above them on the stump. “I must go. Forgive me, but I don’t have the answer; I must go find out. Very gracious of you – to grant this, this extended opportunity – the moisturizer…” He trailed off as he began to make his way east towards the woods.

     Spike grinned at Buffy, exhausted but smug, as Fanden broke into a thumping gallop. “Icelandic devils. They’re dangerous, but famously easy to trick. That was a right nice turn-about.”

     “Icelandic devils,” repeated Buffy. “We just confused … the  _Devil_? About  _moisturizing nail polish remover?”_

     “ _A_  devil,” said Spike, “Just a minor devil; and from what he said, he’s been having serious concentration problems. To meet the Big Guy, I think you’d have to go to Dimmuborgir.” He moved closer to her, reached out to her chest.   “How’s this, then?”

     Buffy looked down and realized her parka was now beyond duct tape repairs. Spike was gingerly folding back the dusty black nylon, batting exploding white feathers out of the way. Underneath, her shirt was also ripped open, exposing a bloody scrape across her shoulder and the top of her breast.   “I feel like I was hit by a car, and my back – I think my back got the worst of it. But I don’t think anything’s broken, and I heal fast. What about you?” She reached her hand up and put it on his face.

     Spike’s back was to the fire, his expression unreadable in the dark. “I’ll be fine. Just need to wash up and eat – eat something. Now let’s get what we came here for. You smell horrible, with all that rotting dust. We’ll finish up here, and get you back and cleaned up.”

     “Right,” said Buffy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Although draugr can suddenly get bigger and heavier in folklore, which I really do find to be a terrifying quality in an undead foe, I may have made up the part where they get really hard and things shatter on them. Though it makes sense to me, since if they suddenly get heavier they must be increasing in density … right? Someone else will have to work out the physics about where that extra matter comes from. And in case you were wondering where – oh where! – to publish your scholarly articles on the proper classification of those pesky, irregular Icelandic undead, here’s just such an article published in a suitable peer-reviewed journal. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5406/jenglgermphil.110.3.0281?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents


	7. The Colleague

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Many thanks to Gort for the beta-ing and encouragement! (And "in a blink.")
> 
> So sorry about the wait for this! The election was just such an unexpected sucker punch that I stopped writing anything new while I used up the backlog of chapters. Also I have this idea that maybe Dru needs her own new chapter, and that might change some things that are coming up (Dru is so unpredictable, you know she just gonna do whatever she wants); but it’s hard to get a handle on her voice. So it’s going to be slower going now.

     Buffy and Spike hadn’t discovered a lot at the scene. There was an unremarkable plastic lighter and an empty can of lighter fluid. There was the spell-circle sand, though neither of them really felt the need to wait for the lab to confirm that it matched the other spell circles. There was a piece of rope that Spike said had bound Drusilla. Buffy hadn’t asked how he knew. She had bagged and tagged, noticeably distant and distracted. A small stack of textured, porous rocks sat just inside the circle. There were no identifiable remains of the ellepiger from the previous night; the bits and pieces of the forest that had risen up into those nightmare forms had been reclaimed by the land. There was nothing to indicate where the witch might have fled, no paths in or out of the clearing beyond the one they had made and Fanden’s tracks east.

     It took them awhile to get back to Spike’s. Spike was stoic but limping, his knee clearly causing him pain. Buffy tried to support him, but her own injuries had become more apparent as the adrenaline from the fight wore off and the cold seeped inside her torn coat. By the time they were back in his kitchen, they were moving slowly, clutched together for support, and Buffy was breathing hard.

     Spike seated her at the table and was studying her covertly from the kitchen counter, trying to decide if whiskey or tea would do her more good. Should he call the Watcher? He put on the kettle, and rummaged under the sink for bandages.

     “I never came across a draugr before,” he said conversationally, testing the waters. “Icelandic undead. Kinda like a cross between a vampire and zombie – they eat blood and flesh both; teeth in layers like a shark. Not clever; but that thing they do, that suddenly-get-bigger-’n-heavier thing – always thought  _that_  had to be a myth. Right terrifying.”

     Buffy didn’t answer. “Buffy?”

     “A devil.” She had been staring at the table’s surface; now she raised her head and looked at him. “A minor devil sent a zombie cat, a big crow, a screaming midge face, that dumb little bat … and that draugr thing. Because he wants me …  _what_  does he want?”

     Spike shifted uneasily. He’d meant it when he agreed to help the Watcher and just let Buffy’s ignorance of her calling ride. It had been nothing to him, after all. His goal had been to find Drusilla – and it still was, of course it was – but now he wanted.…  Now he  _wanted_ , and he had no idea what would get him what he wanted. “He said he wants you to know who you are – wait, did you say ‘midge faces’?” He peered at her.

     Buffy kept going like she hadn’t heard him. “And so none of that …  _none_  of those things has anything to do with my Pantsless Man? Or Drusilla?” Now she sounded flat-out aggrieved.

     Spike had to think a minute; but she was right. It didn’t seem connected. “I think it’s a red herring, pet. This Fanden thing – it’s metaphysical, not homicidal. Er … well. Apart from the ravenous undead.”

     She slumped in her chair, discouraged and spent.

     Spike went around the corner and came back with a folded towel and clothing. He piled the first aid supplies on top. “Here, take off your boots and coat – I’ll shake them out outside while you get a shower. Do you a world of good. You’re still coated in draugr.”   Buffy obediently got out of her boots and coat. “Shower’s right through here, follow me. I’ll leave these here on the sink so you don’t get them dusty before you start.” The bathroom was rustic, with old, chipped ceramic knobs over a claw-foot tub, and wooden paneling. When he turned back from the sink, Buffy was standing in the doorframe. Her hair was dark, full of foul dust. The filthy smears on her face looked adorable, like a street urchin in a play. Spike wondered if he could kiss her, but she probably still had her pepper-spray. “Pet? I’ll go out for some food. Be right back.” She moved slightly to the side, and he edged past her.

     Spike floored the gas to the only place he could think of with human food – an N1 gas station with a small prepared-food section: hotdogs, fries, a coke, cookies packaged in a curl of bright plastic. He hadn’t fed a human in decades, and had no idea what this one might actually eat. When he let himself back in the house, the shower was still running. He heated and gulped some blood, then hid the packaging under other garbage in the bin. He took her coat outside and began to shake it vigorously, stopping when he realized it would lose too much filling; he hung it spread open to air on a chair instead. He banged her boots against the stone wall, and left them by the hearth. He built up the fire. He thought again that he should call the Watcher; but he really didn’t want to share.

     When she emerged, she looked smaller in his old black t-shirt and sweatpants rolled up around her ankles. “Spike? Do you have a comb?”

     “Dru does. But it’s in the taped off part of the house.” She looked at him as though his words made no sense and he went and got the comb, walking straight through the police tape. He brought one of the hotdogs and the coke over – he couldn’t tell if the hotdog had time to touch the table when he let go of it; it was half gone in a blink. He retrieved the other dogs and the fries, and then pulled a chair up beside her. The air was dry from the heat of the fireplace, and her hair began to fluff as he worked through it. The smell of his own shampoo mingling with her scent was so intimate it made his hands unsteady. He tried to block out everything but coaxing the strands straight.

     When he finished and came back to himself, Spike realized Buffy had let her eyes close still sitting up. He couldn’t tell if she was exhausted or shell-shocked, and he tugged her carefully sideways to his chest, fitting her head against his shoulder. “You’re still so cold,” she said. Sooner or later, with the whole universe shoving the truth at her, Spike knew she was going to accept what she was. And then she would work out what he was: quite literally a cold-blooded killer. She’d already seen his game face. He had a short window in which he could be a man to her.

     “Spike,” she said, and her voice was not exhausted, or dreamy, or traumatized; nothing he’d expected. There was iron in it. “There are devils in this world. And draugr.” She pulled away and looked at him intently. “And ellipsis girls.”

     “Ellepiger. Yes. There are a lot of different things in the world.”

     “And you. That wasn’t LSD. You’re actually a … a Klingon?”

     “Klingons are fictional.” He gave her the ghost of a smile. “About that, you were dead-on.”

     “So is the devil. Fictional. Or I thought he was. What are you?”

     He sighed. She was way out ahead of him; his time with her was already over. He didn’t know what he’d been hoping for anyway – Slayer-in-denial and Vampire in a little love nest with black-out blinds?   “Unlikely” didn’t begin to describe it. “Here, kitten.” He placed one of her hands on his forehead, the other so her fingertips crossed the corner of his mouth. “Don’t be scared.”

     “I’m not,” said Buffy. He shut his eyes slowly, and opened them again to sharper vision under a heavier brow. “Oh,” said Buffy softly. Her fingers explored his forehead; she leaned closer as she delicately traced a fang.

     “I’m more like that draugr than the ellepiger,” said Spike.

     “You mean you’re not made of sticks and moss?” said Buffy. “You are nothing like either of them.” She dragged her thumb over his cheekbone, fascinated.

     “I used to be human. The draugr was too, I think, but a lot longer ago.”

     “Used to be? What happened to you?”

     “Drusilla bit me.”

     Buffy sat back in her chair. “Like … like a vampire?”

     “Exactly. Exactly like a vampire.”

     “You, you and Drusilla, my kidnapping victim: you’re  _vampires_.” He nodded, holding eye contact. Buffy scooted slightly further back on her chair to study him. “At least you aren’t sparkly. Okay.”

     There was a long silence; Spike frowned. It was almost insulting. “Okay?”

     “Well,” said Buffy thoughtfully, “You were already a vampire when I met you, right, and you have been this whole time? And Drusilla, your housemate, she … she’s really been kidnapped? And you, who are a vampire, you totally had my back tonight. I have a murder to solve; and it’s somehow connected to your kidnapped … vampire … friend. We’re going to solve the murder of the Pantsless Man, and we’re going to find Drusilla and get her back ali – well. Unharmed.”

     Spike blinked. It made sense – wait, did it make sense? He had thought everything would change when she knew, he’d lose any chance with her, maybe have to fight her. Maybe to the death. Was this fact that was so central to his identity just  _not very important?_  He’d eaten people who’d thought that their position in society or their job could save them, when it was actually completely beside the point; he hadn’t given the littlest fuck what they were beyond blood bags on legs and a satisfying opportunity for violence. Was his being a vampire like that? Inconsequential? Of course she didn’t know she was the Slayer yet, born to indiscriminately kill his kind, but –

     “Wait!” said Buffy, transfixed by some thought.

     “Yes?” asked Spike, cautiously.

     She looked at him, her face intelligent and searching. “Is  _magic_  real?”

    

     After almost another hour of questions, it was becoming obvious Buffy was running out of steam. Her eyes were open, but her head was cradled in her arms on the table. They had covered, to the best of his ability: how magic worked (recipes plus power), why magic worked (didn’t know, didn’t care), the existence of werewolves (yes), zombies (yes), Frankenstein (no), trolls (yes), closet monsters (not as a closet-specific race), fairies (yes), pixies (Spike had looked spooked and changed the subject), and elves (no one ever calls themself an elf). Spike could feel his bruised muscles stiffening from sitting. “Pet, I need a wash myself. Why don’t we put you to bed? We can call your Watcher tomorrow and go talk to him.”

     “My what?” Something about that word rang a bell – a bell that had been ringing a lot, off over some distant mental horizon in some far away valley, over the last couple of days – but she was too exhausted to think.

     “Your friend at the Museum. He knows about this stuff too. Remember when he gave us the ellepiger lecture? And we can show him those rocks we found.”

     Buffy yawned without lifting her head from her arms. “You mean Giles. Tomorrow: Giles.” She shut her eyes.

     Spike carefully wound one arm around her shoulders and pulled her knees up with the other. He stood with her, relaxed and warm, against his chest. He carried her to his bed, where she nestled in like a rabbit; he found an extra blanket and tucked it round her. He toed off his own boots, turned the light out, undressed, and went to the shower. He cleaned himself efficiently, letting the water rinse away the dried blood, but not bothering to dress his wounds; they hadn’t been deep and were already pinkly healing. He padded back to the bed and cautiously eased in under the covers. If she surfaced from wherever she was, it was momentary. He curled around her, wrapping one arm around her waist and sliding the other under her pillow. He listened to her long breaths, her heartbeat steady and slow in her neck, just under his nose. Her warmth had colonized the covers, the mattress. He knew she must be stronger than he was, but the continuous, minute shifting of her body felt fleeting and fragile against his own stillness. Her skin smelled alive, with traces of sweat and moss, adrenaline and soap, and something else underlying those scents that was clean and sweet.

    

     Buffy bolted upright in terror, her heart hammering. That terrible dream, again. So vivid. This time she’d plunged directly into the other mind, and the trailing aftertaste of alien thoughts was so strong she almost felt sick. Patterns: webs and patterns of burning fire, and flaws in patterns, and she herself as one of those flaws. It took her a moment to remember where she actually was and how she had gotten there.

     Spike lay on his back beside her, one arm snaked under where her waist had been. Her jerk into a sitting position hadn’t disturbed him. She checked quickly under the covers: she was fully dressed. Spike was not dressed at all. She was going to go out on a limb and presume that meant he didn’t mind the fact she was older – well. Vampire; who knew how old he was. She studied him a moment in the faint blue light from the window. She didn’t know what to think about the vampires-are-real thing, but if solving this case meant she was going to be beating up crows and arguing with devils and macing blue-skinned monsters, there were probably worse colleagues. He was certainly more able than Constable Brynjarson, her last official partner before her promotion, a tender man still on extended bereavement leave for his dog. She slid out of the bed.

     In the bathroom, she peed and then peered at herself in the mirror. He’d combed her hair, she remembered: how many years had it been since anyone had sat and combed her hair? She’d been exhausted. She didn’t even remember going to bed, just that she’d gobbled down – oh, grossness – three hotdogs, and drifted off feeling safe and cared for. She still did. It could have been predatory, to put her to bed like that, but that wasn’t how it came off. Come to think of it, she was pretty sure getting in bed with the family member of a kidnapping victim when you were in charge of the investigation was also considered predatory. They were going to have to have a discussion.

     She went back to the bedroom. Spike was sitting up, looking hopeful or wary, maybe both. With his preternatural stillness, he could have been a marble statue in a museum, some young god or hero waking to face the next scene in his myth. “You can come back to bed,” he finally said when she didn’t move. “May be a monster, but I’m not gonna hurt you.”

     She sat at the edge of the bed, and he immediately reached to touch her hair. “We should talk,” she said, frowning. “This is against department guidelines.”  

     “They have guidelines about vampires?” said Spike blankly.

     She snorted involuntarily. “Victims, family members of crime victims. We’re not supposed to take advantage.”

     “Advantage.” Spike’s lip quirked up. He slipped his palm against her scalp, watching in fascination as he moved his hand away and the strands slipped silkily through his fingers. “I tucked you into my bed, ’m trying to talk you back into it, and you’re worried about taking advantage of me.” He leaned closer to smell her hair, and his breath in her ear made her toes curl. He bit her ear gently, then pressed his lips just behind her jawline. “Can make up the couch if you’d rather. All proper like.” He moved down her neck, nibbling lightly, to the hollow spot above her clavicle, and his hands slid down to cradle her hipbones, pulling her towards him until she could feel his chest against her back through the t-shirt. Her hottie detector was going off the charts.

     Buffy decided that conversations were overrated.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I had meant to string along Buffy’s denial about the supernatural a little longer, because both denial and stubbornness are among her strengths. I even had a plan, in which she dismissed Fanden as some body-altering weirdo and muttered something about talking to her therapist about the draugr before getting back to the business of being a real-world detective. But having the devil whisper in your head … oh well. I think that’s played out.


	8. The Victim

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the tiniest chapter, and it made me extra nervous, because ... Dru. So thanks to Gort for her keen beta eye and to Flootzavut for her extra eye.
> 
> I'm hoping to post the next chapter this weekend, since this is so wee.

     Drusilla perched beside the sleeping witch in the dark, leaning close to see her better through golden eyes. So bonny, all copper and bronze, a dainty little poppet — though the pulse in her neck wasn’t even tempting. Dru might be restless and famished, but the witch would taste of naught but desperation and grief. Besides, every shadow whispered that this here beneath her was a right necessary dolly. She straightened up again, toying with the slack loop of rope that had bound her wrists. The saggy waist of the necropants peeked above the waistband of the witch on the bed, loose and unadhered, just a terrible waste of a wonderful skinning. The pants were dead as a hobnail come loose from a boot.

     For someone whose every sleeping breath roiled with power, this witch was curiously ham-handed. Though Dru had relished the Alder Tree Girls. Watching them move, for a moment she’d thought the bits of self that used to break free in her mind had come over all corporeal, taking form as a herd of jerky, angular Drus. She’d wanted to join them, dance like a clockwork doll through the trees. The witch had magicked her away, but not before she’d caught a glimpse of her darling boy fighting them: crashing and bashing, all a-whirl with his axe.

     And all agog at his companion. That was a satisfaction, as right as night rain. She’s seen  _that_  straight through time. His lady, though, was a whole different trouble, a crossways knot in the warp and weft of the world. She was wholly herself, but she saw halves for wholes; she was certain of things that weren’t so. It would get set right — this way or that way the wyrm would turn — but not yet. Soon, but not yet.

   Dru straightened, and let her eyes range across the room. Crystals and beakers; jars and bottles; shiny baubles and balls; and jumbling, tumbling piles of books. Forgotten herbs beribboned in bundles. A framed photo on the desk: the witch and a girl, laughing and sunlit, their hair wind-tossed. Mammoth, jagged boulders strewn haphazardly across the black beach behind them. The girl had such fetching almond eyes, such bitable lips, and the sea had been sighing, over and over – but Dru knew on sight that girl was already off to some other, more luminous plane. She wanted to be here though, wanted to reach through and leech the blackness away. Such a sweet young dead thing.

     Drusilla listened to the witch’s slumbering breaths. There would be time to eat before she woke. It wouldn’t do to be weak. Dru rose from the bed. She passed by the chair with the smudged spell circle where she’d sat bound, and drifted lightly into the hallway. Here were more pictures, more tattered bits of a battered life, all hope and light drained out through the holes. And more books, barely a path between them on the stair treads as she made her way down.

     If kitchens could be ghosts, that was where she was standing. Dru could see what had been: the almond-eyed girl cooking, the witch reading at the table, everything in its place. Not fancy. Warm and worn, soothing and soulful, all just exactly right. But the now-kitchen was rank; crusted dishes and rotting food overwhelmed the sink, the table, the counter. Dru knew there’d been years she would have been blind to it, when her thoughts were ever beyond her surroundings. Maybe she would even have drunk the blood drained from the man-turned-to-pants, lukewarm and fetid on the counter in a little plastic tub like carry-out soup – but now that thought curdled in her mind like old milk. She stepped delicately through the kitchen to the door, let herself out into the sleepy city night. She breathed deeply, pulling her surroundings into her body. She smiled. Akureyri might have no sheep; but it teemed with tasty things asleep.

    

     The witch woke as she always did these days; with a jolt of bone-deep rage and grief. She sat upright. She ignored the figure lolling safe in the encircled chair, wrists bound. She found her feet and headed to the door, already intent on coffee and research. So much to do, and this time it had to be right. She was half down the hall when she froze in place – it wasn’t possible that there’d been blood on the vampire’s lips. It wasn’t.

     Dru’s eyes slid sideways after the witch and her tongue flicked out mischievously, whisked away the drops. All clean and tidy now. Princess would be ready to be go back out to play.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Akureyri is Iceland’s second largest city, with a lovely little historic downtown and a wide water-side path. It was also the place we came across restaurants designed for American tourists, which was a little disconcerting (I want to be there, but not think of myself as a tourist, is that so wrong?), but boy do they make a good lamb burger in Akureyri. And it’s a great base for exploring the north coast, including Krafla and the supremely lovely geothermal baths at Myvatin.


	9. The Plan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Gort for the beta! And especially for pointing out that police think speed limits exist for the rest of us. And I've done the bad thing here, rewriting a bit and then just posting without re-betaing because I couldn't bear not to. Any new mistakes are all mine. Please let me know if you see anything.
> 
> Writing this chapter has made me much more appreciative of all those library scenes in the show. Though perhaps finding a way to skip the explication altogether would have been even better.

     Buffy was so comfortable she felt weightless, cocooned in warmth and utterly relaxed. But something had brought her skimming lightly to the surface of wakefulness — a clinking; a shift in the mattress. She patted around with one arm blindly until her hand hit denim. She opened her eyes. Spike was seated on the edge of the bed, setting one of two mugs on the night table, and she was batting at his butt. “Coffee,” she mumbled gratefully.

     “Tea. Wasn’t expecting a sleep-over,” said Spike. Buffy frowned. “Wasn’t expecting  _you_. Made yours with sugar and milk?”

     “I don’t even know what I like in tea.” But between the sudden uncertainty in his eyes and his bed-head, it felt wrong to indulge in coffee petulance. She sat up, pulling her legs under her for balance, and reached for the mug. Her stomach rumbled audibly. “Thank you. I don’t suppose there’s anything to eat?”

     “Just blood and milk in the fridge.” He tugged the blanket further up over her bare shoulders.

     “Ew.” She took a sip. She’d never had any reason to consider vampire groceries. “Where’s the blood from?”

     “Human’s from the hospital in Akureyri. Guy sells it to us if it expires. Small hospital, so sometimes there’s extra, sometimes not. Butcher boy delivers sheep’s blood regular. Though Dru sometimes goes out for fresh.”

     “You don’t … you don’t … you know. Vampires in movies are all, ‘Grr, argh’?” She made a vague clawing gesture with her free hand.

     Spike spoke carefully. “If you’re asking if I go out eating people: not here. Not the last couple years. Not even the delivery boy. It would have drawn too much attention — maybe from you, right? Dead and missing people piling up? Dru was sick and weak when we came here, and it takes planning to get off this island. She would have been at risk.” He looked away. “But I have done. Most of a century, I killed.”  There was a pause, and his face suddenly lightened. “Wait, I bought biscuits!"  He rolled to his feet and left the room.

     Buffy stared at the door he’d left through. She took another sip of tea.

    

     Spike had been unaccountably jumpy when she’d pulled out her cellphone to arrange to meet Giles. Anyanka was apparently already at the Museum — that was interesting — and they were on their way to take the new evidence there to discuss next steps. Buffy had explained what she knew about the midges, in the process haphazardly telling the story of Fanden and the draugr.   Giles had been reduced to a parody of a fussy Brit, all “dear lord” and “I say.” And then: “Buffy, are you quite sure you should bring Spike? I mean to say … he is, ahem …”

     “He’s a vampire, Giles. I know it.”

     “Ah. And that doesn’t … you don’t …”

     “You sent me to consult with vampires in the first place, Giles, and you didn’t have any problem pursuing a suspect through the woods with him. He’s the one who suggested I call you this morning.”

     She’d heard Giles’ sigh even over the patchy cellphone service. “Are you sure you should be involved in this matter at all, Buffy?”

     “Giles, I don’t see how I could avoid it. Someone has abducted Drusilla. Kidnapping is a criminal matter, even when it isn’t related to another homicide. This is my  _job_. We need to find her before anything worse happens. And we’re bringing a big fat umbrella in case the sun gets above the hills.”

     “Ah. Yes. And you’re … quite sure that vampnapping is also within your purview?”

     “I don’t really see how it couldn’t be — I mean, what if that kidnapper isn’t stopped, and then goes after a, a —”

     “A person?” Giles had asked pointedly.

     “Spike is a person. I’m guessing Drusilla is too.”

     “I see.”

     “Wait a minute — Giles, you knew they were vampires. You knew about vampires?”

     There’d been a silence. “As you know, I study these things. That’s  _my_  job. And you may recall, you were fairly clear about your absolute dismissal of the mystical when we met, even when confronted with those rather outrageous — and clearly unnatural — midges.” Buffy hadn’t had an answer to that. “Buffy, in all this talking about what is and isn’t real, with Fanden, and with Spike, have you … learned anything about yourself?”

     It was a train of thought Buffy had been shying away from. She’d disliked the implications of Fanden’s speech: that she was not who she thought she was, that her sense of self was somehow wrongly invested. Fanden himself had been all tenacious, insidious corruption, and then one ridiculous riddle later he was just some silly faun. That metamorphosis had been a relief at the time. But she did not much like the idea of something similar happening to her; that she might forget, or have somehow already forgotten, her true self. “No.”

     “I see. Do come over.”

    

     When they stopped off along the way for her to change into some fresh clothes and replace her sad, slain coat, Spike had stepped into her foyer with such cautious wonder that it made her heart hurt. She’d kissed him in response, half expecting the kiss to spin into something more; instead he’d held her tightly for long minutes, as though trying to fit as much of his body against hers as possible. How many years must it have been since he’d last felt welcomed in, anywhere?   It was hard to reconcile all his parts: he was prickly and acerbic and vulnerable; a torrential fighter with a double-sided battle axe, who was also a focused and intensely aware lover. She wondered if he could even tell a lie. It seemed unlikely. He telegraphed his emotions with all the subtlety of a cartoon creature.

     She’d gone into her bedroom to clean up and change her clothes. When she’d come back out he’d been engrossed in the contents of her pantry, sniffing the protein bars and studying the single-serving oatmeal packets.

    

     They reached the Museum a little after 11. Spike ran for the door with her umbrella held at an angle; the sun of the foreshortened day was just poking above the cliffs that leaned over the fjord, but was not yet high enough to be hidden by the thick cloud cover. When Buffy caught up with him in the empty library, he was patting out embers on the legs of his pants.   “Seriously? You burst into flames if the sun hits you?”

     Spike snorted. “Pet, I’m a vampire. Sun allergy.”

     “Yes, but … it’s just faster-acting than I expected … wait. Can you turn into a bat?”

     “No,” said Spike, taking a step towards her, eyes crinkling slightly at the outer edges. He didn’t look like he was thinking about bats.

     “Mist? Mist could be really useful.”

     “No.” Something about the hint of gravel at the bottom of his voice made her feel funny. Spike took another step.

     “Hi!” said Anyanka, arriving from the kitchen with a brilliant smile.

     Belatedly, it occurred to Buffy that discussing vampire attributes in a public space — well, yesterday she herself would have reacted with scorn. It also occurred to her she didn’t like the frank way Anyanka’s eyes were travelling over Spike. “’lo,” said Spike. “And who might you be?”

     “I’m the District Medical Officer, Anyanka. And I know exactly who you are; Giles brought me up to speed. A pleasure,” said Anyanka to Spike. Turning slightly to Buffy, she said confidingly, “He’s rather famous, you know. He’s in the books.”

     “Does everybody in Iceland know about vampires except me?” said Buffy.  Anyanka looked away. “Seriously? Everybody.” Buffy stepped to the table and dropped into a chair. “And I’m supposed to be the detective.”

     “Well, you’re a very good detective, Buffy,” said Anyanka. “I know I really admire you. And there are hardly any vampires up around the Arctic Circle, for obvious reasons, so you shouldn’t feel completely terrible. But you’re also the Sla–”

     “Buffy!” said Giles, with uncharacteristic chumminess, coming in from the kitchen with a tray holding a pot of what Buffy devoutly hoped was coffee and — teacups? Maybe Giles just didn’t own coffee mugs, because that pot had just better not be full of another disappointing beverage. “I believe you said you had evidence from the site of the bonfire? Why don’t we take a look.”

     “But Rupert,” said Anyanka, with something coaxing in her voice. “Wait, these were at the witch’s bonfire? Buffy, how long have you lived in Iceland? Look at these.” She was holding up the largish baggie with the rocks from the cairn.

     “What do you mean? Should I know something about those?” asked Buffy. She couldn’t focus on that right now. Giles had hurriedly put the tray down, so that it sat on the far side of the table. Anyanka and he were entirely body-blocking the pot. If Buffy went around the table the long way, though, it would be undefended.

     Anyanka gave an exaggerated sigh. “Well, I don’t need to take them back to the lab to tell you they’re recently-formed volcanic flow. These are from Krafla, probably the eruption in ’84. Look at the edges, they’re barely weathered, and just trace amounts of lichen.”

     “Lot of demonic energy round Krafla,” said Spike, somehow having bypassed every obstacle to the pot. “Very relaxing.”   He poured a cup of coffee, put in sugar and milk, stirred. Buffy bit her lip. He put his hands on both of Anyanka’s shoulders and moved her firmly out of the way, then brought the cup over and set it carefully on the table in front of Buffy. The taste and warmth of the coffee filled her mouth, and she hummed a little; she realized he was watching her very seriously. When she was done, Spike took the empty cup directly out of her fingers and went back to the pot. Buffy sighed.

     Oblivous, Giles said, “And these pot shards. They — wait a minute.” He went to a bookcase, searching, and came back with a thick, hardback book which, judging by the blank fabric cover and tattered edges, was old enough to have been re-bound more than once. “These are hieroglyphics. I very much fear this was a … a rather special funerary urn.” He looked from the shards to the rocks. “If someone is both using an urn of Osiris and summoning energy from Krafla, and if that someone has taken a vampire hostage, I hate to even imagine what it is they are trying to do.”

     “Well, the urn is broken,” said Anyanka. “That won’t be easy to replace. The three of you may have been more effective than you knew when you interrupted her the other night. If it’s a resurrection she’s going for, she’s going to need to find another way.”

     “What would kidnapping Dru have to do with a resurrection? Why would the witch need a vamp?” asked Spike.

     “Given the apparent misunderstanding that went into this witch’s attempt to make necropants, I can speculate,” said Giles. “But I’m afraid you’re not going to like it.”

     “Misunderstanding? What kind of misunderstanding?”

     Anyanka butted in cheerfully. “This particular witch seems to have mistaken malevolence for power. In the necropants ritual, there’s every indication she skinned the man alive — no consent, no burial. I’d be very surprised if the pants so much as adhered, never mind produced any money. The whole exercise was a waste of effort and time.”

     “Ah, yes, that does sum it up rather … uniquely. But Anyanka is right, this witch seems to believe that she can enhance the effects of spells by making the elements more cruel. Which is not an entirely unreasonable train of thought in relation to Icelandic sorcery, which does have a rather gruesome and unusual traditional element of torturous sacrifice —”

     “Rupert,” Anyanka rebuked, nodding toward Spike. “She’s his sire.”

     “What? Oh, yes.” Giles’ hands twitched towards his glasses momentarily, but then he continued. “In the case of a resurrection spell, that could reasonably mean she’ll try to make the spell more powerful by using a particularly dark sacrifice. It would be a sort of parallel fallacy, if you will, for the same witch who thought torture would be more potent than consent to  _also_  think sacrificing a vampire would be more potent than sacrificing an innocent. Quite deranged in magical terms — the spell actually requires both the innocence itself and the willingness to violate that innocence as power sources — but it has a similar twisted logic.”

     “Dru,” said Spike. “She’s going to sacrifice Dru? That’s not going to happen.” He looked savage — it was the first time Buffy had seen him so obviously angry, angrier in human face than he appeared with his fangs and bumps. “Dru  _is_  an innocent — she didn’t seek this out; she was driven crackin’ mad first; even when she was killing, she didn’t understand half what she did.”  

     Giles looked up at Spike, bemused. “‘Even when she was’?”

     Buffy, who despite the grim turn of conversation was feeling the centeredness of a caffeine addiction sated, had picked up the bag of rocks. “So we’re talking about an inept or inexperienced witch, right?  Does that explain why she used symbols of Krafla instead of driving on over to Krafla? I mean, it’s just not that far away.”

     “We can be there in a couple hours,” said Spike.

     “Not if we obey the speed limit,” said Giles. Spike and Buffy both looked baffled.

     “Oh, fine. Some people do, you know,” said Giles. “And going to Krafla is a rather good thought, but I think we do have some time for further research. If, as these fragments of urn suggest, our witch seeks a resurrection, she’ll most likely be aiming at midnight. It’s a standard time for such dark magicks.”

     “She might have used these rocks, instead of going there, for more privacy,” said Anyanka. “A forest is better than a lava field full of steam vents and fissures in a wide variety of ways — there’s far less risk of a twisted ankle or caustic burns. But this is a witch who is really going in for escalation of materials. I think the same will hold true for settings. I bet we can run into her at midnight.” Anyanka sounded a little bit as though she was suggesting bumping into someone at a mall, and making it look casual.

     “I wonder if I should call for backup.” Buffy looked at Spike. “I wouldn’t be able to explain your … or Drusilla’s … special circumstances. Or magic, if she pops a bunch of ellepiger up out of volcanic rocks.”

     Anyanka said brightly, “Oh, I’m sure one vamp, one Watcher, and the Sla—”

     “Yes, yes,” said Giles a little desperately. “I think you have a very effective… and understanding… team right here, Buffy.”

     Anyanka looked at him. “I really don’t know what you’re afraid of at this point, Rupert.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I may have based some little part of this on waking up in a hostel in Eastfjords and finding there was no coffee, and then blithely assuming I could get some on the road. On a Sunday in the off-season in Iceland. It must have been 170 km, over the mountains and almost to Krafla, before we spotted a little hand-made sign that said “COFFEE,” and detoured perhaps 20 km out of our way, through the lava fields on an unpaved track, to drink coffee at a lady’s kitchen table off of plastic doilies. Just thinking about that cup floods me with relief. She also gave us homemade rhubarb cake.
> 
> Please let me know what you think!


	10. The Perp

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First of all, I am sorry for the long wait for this chapter! I had really good intentions.
> 
> Second, many, many thanks: first of all, to Gort, who beta’d this lurching & uneven first fic very patiently. Though it’s my nature to keep messing around, so if you see an error it’s not her fault and you should let me know. Also to Flootzavut, for a little extra beta-soothing along the way. And a special thanks to Sigurður Atlason, the real-life proprietor of the Icelandic Museum of Witchcraft and Sorcery in Holmavik, who provided me with Giles’ shouted spell in Icelandic. And then, of course, I would like to thank everyone who encouraged this impulsive fledge writer with a lower-than-average ability to stick to a plan: your comments and likes are the only reason I have finished this.

     Dru could be patient. She had someone to see. An appointment, of sorts — if seeing hundreds of versions of their eventual meeting, running like a jagged stripe across hundreds of variant futures, could be dubbed “an appointment.”

     Beside her, she could feel the little witch’s mind fraying, hear her consistent muttering as she talked herself onwards, endless repetitions and renditions of twitchy know-how to bring her lover back, spells disassembled and reassembled into new streams of words. Dru could have told her the spell was unlikely, that it had never been the right path, that none of the semi-true reanimations she might achieve could possibly fill a hole so deep. It was the wrong remedy for a rended heart. Dru could have told her a lot of things, but the witch would not have heard. Right now she was like a collapsing star, her borders so black with dark power that no light could shine through to her insides. Wild child of darkness though she was, Dru had still not particularly enjoyed sitting in the cluttered Škoda passenger seat next to a simmering black hole.

     But: Dru had an appointment. Something was waking after a very long sleep, a languid tendril of consciousness licking out like an arm emerging from under the covers in a sinuous stretch. When her mind edged close, it was a shocking contact, delirious and delicious: her own gifts flamed up and outward, showed her the world reworked in an alien, reptile view. Existence rewritten in strands of fire. She wanted to comb through those strands, to know them, to wrap her own mind in them; she wanted to pluck right back along those threads until she stood looking straight past the scales and eyes and into the heart of the creature of fire who dreamt the world that way. Really, best to tolerate the distressing proximity in the Škoda. It was still a long road to Krafla in the sleet and rain. If she got out and walked, she’d meet that beautiful mind all adrip.

    

    

     Buffy had fallen in love with Iceland the first time she visited. That had been in summer, when geysers and hot springs and black lava beaches had glistened through days that almost bumped into each other as the sky only briefly darkened. She’d loved the single-lane bridges dotting Route 1; the craters and fumaroles just off the road; the discreet ecosystems surrounding hundreds of waterfalls; and being chased off ancient battlefields by shaggy, intrigued horses that were absolutely sure she had something tasty in her pockets. She’d known, of course, that the sun was on an extreme cycle and the night would take over. But her first winter here had still shocked her to her California core. She’d suddenly better understood why the nation boasted high rates of both novelists and binge drinkers. Night without reprieve wore you down, unless you had something to do so engrossing you forgot your surroundings. Especially up north, where the low trajectory of the winter sun might well mean it failed to reach down into a given valley for a month, and snow in the mountain passes sometimes cut off towns entirely for weeks at a time. She had to admit it was convenient, now that she was paired with a sun-ignitable … boyfriend? Lover? She slurped up a spoonful of lamb soup and snuck a look at Spike, draped against his kitchen counter with a ceramic beer mug of blood. Did she actually have a  _vampire lover_? It came across as romantic and juvenile at the same time — and wasn’t there a television show about a vampire who befriends a detective to solve crime? Some American thing. It had always sounded excessively silly to Buffy. Though maybe not any sillier or more fantastic than procedural shows in which each crime boasted recoverable forensic evidence, or every week a yet more devious serial killer surfaced — only to be caught by tall, attractive detectives who investigated in stilettos as their tousled hair magically failed to contaminate the crime scenes.

     And then there was Spike’s matter-of-fact comment about a past life full of killing. This man who had taken her coffee even more seriously than she did had once been a very bad man — but did the same rules apply? Was asking a vampire to adhere to human morals like asking your cat to choose salad? Fortunately, Buffy had never had any ambitions of enforcing a moral code; enforcing criminal law humanely was really quite enough to handle as a calling. Spike said he wasn’t killing any more. He did not strike her as dishonest, and there’d been no sign of a rising death toll in the Northern districts. Whoever was selling the expired blood, though — well, they were probably violating health codes.

    

     “Spike,” called Buffy from the doorway as she shrugged back into her coat, “I have to stop at one of the precincts along the way for a new billy stick.” She sighed as she examined the remains of her trusty club. The encounter with the draugr had left it splintered the long way, and it was still coated in stinky dust. It was shaped more like a long, sharp stake now than a club. “This one is useless. Do you have a kindling pile?”

     Spike made an indecipherable sound, and took it from her gingerly. “Um … ’m bringing the axe. Interest you in a sword?” He hefted one towards her, in a long leather sheath.

     Buffy dragged her eyes away from the jewel centered in the ornate hilt, blinking at her like an eye. “Sword? Uh — no.”

     He frowned, considering. “’s a good one. Crossbow, then? Won’t be much use once you get up close.”

     “I — police don’t take swords and crossbows on investigations, Spike. I just need a more functional club.”

     “Right then,” said Spike, nodding his understanding, “here.” He lifted the lid of a chest by the door.

     Buffy eyed the hefty, spiked medieval mace he held out to her. “A  _billy_  club.”

     Spike opened his mouth and then shut it again. He put the mace back into the chest, before slinging the sword across his own back. He gave her a look. “Just in case.”

    

     As Buffy pulled the squad car in to the unmanned gas station on Route 1 where they had arranged to meet, she could see that Giles and Anyanka had beaten them there. Giles emerged from his car, struggling with a crossbow in the rising wind and spatter of rain, and Anyanka clearly had something long and bulky strapped on under her long coat. Buffy swung out of the squad car and sighed. “Look,” she said. “I appreciate everyone’s efforts. But we aren’t going to war. If there’s danger, I want the three of you out of there. Is that clear?”

     Spike said gruffly, “Can handle myself. I won’t leave Dru if she’s there — and I won’t leave you facing a witch alone.”

     “That’s … quite admirable,” said Giles. “Might I point out, Buffy, that if it’s magic you’re facing — and if I can avoid getting left behind, as in our last encounter with this witch — I might be able to offer some expertise you lack?”

     “He’s very good with defensive spells,” said Anyanka. “I myself can do a handy curse or two. By the way, this is for you.” She held something dangly out to Spike, who took it carefully. “If she casts a spell directly on you, it won’t do a thing. But side effects from spells on Drusilla, rippling out to control your undead flesh? That should dampen them.”

     “Ta.” Spike looped the thin cord around his neck.

     Buffy stared at the District Medical Officer. “Well. Okie-dokie. But let’s just all understand that the point of this is to identify a suspect. Not to, ah, cast spells, or hurl … fireballs … not even necessarily to make an arrest if waiting would be smarter. And while we’ve got a few clues pointing to Krafla, there’s no real reason to think we’ll find anything — so don’t go assuming anyone you see is dangerous. In all likelihood, there will be nothing to see tonight and I’ll be back to look for evidence in the daylight.”

    

     Spike often preferred action to thought. It was cleaner and more direct. But right now he had nothing to do but think. They were back on the road, Buffy behind the wheel, winding towards the Krafla geothermal power plant with Giles and Anyanka behind them. The scenery — dramatic as it was with craggy, moonlit lava fields and sulphuric steam vents erupting out of the ground like cosmic science projects run amuck — was just too familiar to distract him.

     He realized now that it was just as well that Buffy had learned what he was before they’d slept together. She’d taken the news shockingly well, with curiosity and rigor; one new fact to be incorporated into an expanded view of the world. And she’d given him considerable benefit of the doubt, with no hysterical assumptions about his evilness. Spike avoided considering that not so long ago, he might have taken offense.

     He suspected finding out that she was a supernatural being herself — having a whole sacred calling suddenly thrust on her, after her adult life was formed — would be an entirely different kettle of fish. His own waking as a vampire had been accompanied by a slew of mystical changes that really couldn’t be ignored: the exit of the soul, the irresistible fledgling thirst for blood, the burgeoning lust for demonic pleasures. Whatever corresponding changes occurred when a Slayer was called had come years ago for Buffy; she’d incorporated them into her role as a policewoman.

     All in all, Giles’ reluctance to have her know what she was … it was silly, and it was dangerous. And what difference did it make to Giles? She wasn’t called on to stake Giles. This dithering in fear over her first Watcher’s fate was pointless; for all they knew, her younger self had made the right call about that particular wanker. For a moment Spike found himself distracted by the very notion that Buffy, not long ago, had been a perceivably different age. He glanced sidelong at her in the driver’s seat, her hands comfortable and competent on the wheel as she took the curvy mountain road, singing something — was that a song about the world getting  _moister_?   It was only a matter of time before some glory-seeking nasty sniffed her out. It had been pure luck that she’d survived the draugr. She needed to know what she was, and she needed the right training. She needed to be prepared.

     And then she checked behind for Giles’ car in the mirror, he was entirely lost for a moment, watching her funny nose profiled against the darkness as her hair slid loose along her shoulder. She turned back and caught his gaze, pausing to smile and curl her hand on his leg before looking back to the road. Surely realizing her Slayerness wouldn’t erase the past couple of days. He could help her, help her train, teach her things the Watchers didn’t have a clue about … and then tug her back into bed and make sure she knew he was hers right down to his marrow.

    

     As they coasted past the geothermal power plant on the side road to Krafla, Buffy flicked off her headlights. She was pleased to see Giles, following her, do the same a moment later. Her doubts about finding anything at all were genuine; but there was no reason to announce their approach. She pondered how, exactly, she had come to be headed out for a potential arrest at midnight with a team of archaically armed civilians. Two of whom were apparently magically inclined, and the third of which wasn’t human.

     Spike turned to her and cleared his throat, looking serious and oddly formal, as the car mounted the last rise between them and the Krafla lava fields. “Buffy, luv, there’s something you need to know —” His words cut off abruptly as they topped the ridge. Buffy braked the car at the sheer impossibility of the spectacle that greeted them. But she had confronted a string of impossible things recently, and the notion of impossibility was losing meaning. This, she told herself firmly, was just one more unknown to put in context. She took a deep breath, then opened her door and got out of the car. Giles eased in just behind them, and the four gathered together on the road, wordlessly taking in the scene.

     The lava field — normally a cracked plain of dead, jagged rubble with occasional muddy pools of caustic bubbling liquid — was now glowing from underneath, every fissure exposing molten rock. From their vantage point, all the reddish gleams funneled towards one focus, strengthening and brightening as they approached the stark cone of the Víti crater. Light from the magma reflected off the low, roiling clouds, also funneling towards a central point above the cone’s jagged edge, and silhouetted two figures standing there. As they watched, the shorter figure raised her arms to the sky and the clouds drew in, sucking towards her; Buffy smelled a wave of ozone over the chemical stench. The second figure on the ridge stood slim and inert beside the witch. “Dru,” hissed Spike furiously.

     “We need a distraction,” said Buffy, forcing herself past any lingering disbelief; what she needed now was focus, and a plan. “We have to stop her before she does anything to your friend. And then we need to take her into custody.”

     “Can drive a little closer,” said Spike. “If I head up the road with the Watcher and Demon-girl, you could get round the other side of the crater on the access road, come up from behind.”

     Buffy looked at them. Spike’s confidence in her abilities to take on the sorceress alone was comforting, but it would leave the rest of them exposed. And “Watcher” – exactly why was that term so familiar, again? “Demon-girl” wasn’t familiar at all, but somehow it fit Anyanka to a tee. “The three of you would be a target.”

     “That’s the idea. We can get her attention — charge the hill with our headlights on, get our big bad weapons out. You go around the other way round and get Dru out of there.”

     Giles said grimly, “I can try to bind her power. And hopefully she’ll already be taxed near the limits of her strength, working a spell of this magnitude while containing Drusilla. But we need to time things well — if a sorcerer with enough power to incidentally wake a sleeping volcano has time to turn her full focus on either us or you, Buffy, we’re in trouble.”

    

     Buffy left first, backtracking to the power plant and then creeping along the unpaved road that ran behind some of the hillier parts of the plain. The glowing rivulets in the ground concerned her; if the crust of earth started giving way, or the car tires started melting, they could all just disappear here and no one would ever know what had happened to them. Or they could burn their feet; her new boots! She radioed in, repressing the thought that even the most competent police backup would be woefully underprepared for a sorceress summoning magic, magma, and massive storm clouds while threatening the unlife of a bespelled vampire. She’d just have to have the perp in handcuffs before they arrived. When she was as close as she could get to the bottom of Víti without exposing her car to view, she parked, and began the climb over the rocks.

     Buffy darted over the ridgeline in a crouch and paused, considering her path before she started down the other side towards the base of the cone. There was a crack in the earth running the direction she needed to go, one lip higher than the other; it would give her some cover, particularly at the bottom where it jutted high and dark over a hollow. By the time she was past that, she’d have reached the jumbled rock slope, and be half-obscured by the steep angle of the cone itself. The air at Krafla was always heavy with fumes from belching fumeroles and mud pots, but Buffy could feel more than that now: her skin was crawling in waves.  

     At least the ground along the cracked earth was relatively smooth. She moved as quickly as she dared in the surreal landscape. Light sleet was vaporizing as it hit the glowing orange magma, rising up again as fog lit from beneath by the molten glow. It was eminently suitable, thought Buffy, to be sneaking up on a witch-gone-bad in a setting designed for a horror movie. As she passed the darkened hollow in the hillside, a slinking, clinking series of notes made her freeze in place, staring up toward the cone — but no, those sounds came from inside the hollow. She turned and looked harder, staring into what was now clearly a deeper cave than she’d thought, its walls bending back out of sight. The rocks flickered faintly red, of course, but there was something else down there, a suggestion of something glinting gold and metallic — her dream came to her again, that distinct intelligence — this was no time for  _that_. She turned forward again, away from the opening, shaking off the impression of a drowsy, massive serpentine motion. She’d twist her ankle if she didn’t stay focused, and that would leave her vampire and friends exposed. Buffy began to climb the dark grey gravel of Víti itself.

    

     Giles was beginning to suspect that the mud on this side of Víti possessed occult levels of stickiness. The plan had been to drive the tourist route up the slope, lights on, as far as they could and then to charge at the witch — a somewhat terrifying plan, now that they could truly feel the caustic power rolling off her. As it turned out, also a somewhat unachievable plan. The driving part had gone fine, and the witch had undoubtedly seen them coming. But now the mud stuck to their shoes, so thick and heavy he was having trouble lifting each leg. It clung not in a layer but en masse, as though all the mud wanted in its whole muddy life was to form itself into giant, unwalkable shoes. Spike was doing a little better, up ahead, with his vampiric strength. Anyanka had fallen behind, her feet now double-wide and boat-shaped. His own shoes were done for, assuming there were still shoes under there at all; he was tottering along as though his feet were encased in round melons, melons covered in glue. “Spike!” he shouted into the rising wind.   Spike paused and looked back. “You’re going to reach them first. Can you perform a spell? If I tell you the words?”

     “Not likely. Not one of my talents.”

     “Right,” yelled Giles. “Go as fast as you can — I’ll try to bind her powers when you get close. And maybe I can do something to speed us along!” It had been a very long time, but he _could_ do something about this, he could. He leaned forward, drawing a symbol directly into the mud before him. He stood back up and shut his eyes. “ _Farðu nú norður og niður, náist þér hvergi friður; hver þinn leggur og liður limist bálið kviður; kveljist hrekka smiður ætíð meir né en miður, maðurinn hver þess biður. Þinni ræðu flýðu frá, fjandi óttabundinn, minni mæðu endir á aldrei skuli fundinn!_ ” he shouted. He opened his eyes expectantly.

   Behind him, Anyanka groaned. Rupie was such an eager linguist. But he should have stuck to Latin.

    

     If that — that  _thing_  was part of the plan to create a distraction, Buffy had to admit it was working. Even against Buffy. She realized she had not only stood up to get a better look but had also walked forward, entirely forgetting she had been trying to sneak up on the witch, who was now only a few yards away.   But it didn’t matter; the witch had faltered in her chanting and was staring down the hill, past Drusilla. Drusilla, apparently freed to move by the witch’s inattention, had also turned to look down the slope and paused, her gown and hair flowing in the rain and wind. Because beyond the spell-casting tableau, something flat-out appalling was happening between where Spike was charging up the hill with his axe and where Giles and Anyanka stood further down — it was as though the path itself had decided to join Spike. It reared like a big, muddy ribbon, rippling and bubbling and flowing upwards like a … rearing vaguely humanoid mud thing. As Buffy watched, a portion of the barely-formed head separated and fell away with a plop, the mud too soft to hold its shape in the sleet; more mud pushed up to reform the blocky form even as it lumbered forward. Drusilla tore her gaze away first, turning back to refocus on the witch. “Naughty, naughty little sorceress — it isn’t nice to paralyze your friends unless it’s all in good fun.” Her gaze flicked past the witch to meet Buffy’s for a moment, and Buffy suddenly remembered the sensation she’d had looking at Drusilla’s photo. Her eyes were forcefully intelligent, even as her words came across as sing-song dotty. “Fun meets the sun. But I have someone else to call upon — ’fraid I can’t stay for tea.”

     The witch, who Buffy could now see had the body of a young woman, but whose eyes were entirely black and crackling with malice, responded by raising her arms and shouting something — the funnel of clouds over her strengthening and streaks of red lightening zapping down. Drusilla was tossed backwards. Spike charged forward with a shout, backed by the golem of stinky, ever-replenishing mud. Buffy took a deep breath, pushed all of the impossible things before her out of her mind, and brought her billy club down — not too hard — on the back of the witch’s head.

     As the witch slumped, the cloud funnel relaxed, drawing back up into a more cloud-like, layered shape. The fires of hell, across the lava field, began to fade. After a bit of matter-of-fact shouting from Anyanka in some language Buffy didn’t understand, the animate mud lapsed slowly downward into a formless, sticky mass that began to ooze thickly down the crater side.

     Buffy knelt beside the unconscious witch, handcuffing her wrists behind her back and checking to make sure she was breathing easily. She suddenly became acutely aware that Drusilla had walked over, almost touching her. She was in vampire face in her muddied white gown. “I knew. I knew you would find us. And look at the pretty poppet all limp. Can I take her along with me? Be a sweet treat for tea.” She gave an odd giggle; even with the frankly terrifying fangs and yellow eyes, there was still something appealing about her.

     “Uh,” said Buffy.

     Spike, reaching them, said gently, “It’s human justice for her, Dru. Buffy here is police.” He reached out and patted Dru’s face consolingly, and Buffy felt a brief flare of jealousy; but this was his ex, and a man — or other sort of person — who was kind to their exes was a good thing, surely. Giles and Anyanka were making headway up the crater behind him, with the mud now largely out of the way. In the distance, she could see the flashing lights of squad cars approaching.

     “Ooo-ooo.” Dru sounded sad as she let her face lapse back to human. “She gets it all then. My Spike and the poppet too.”

     “You left me years ago, Dru. And we do well ’nough as family now.”

     “I made you ready.” He looked at her, and he saw, under the daft words, the genuine canniness and affection of Dru at her best. “You’re ready for the midnight sun. She’ll shine you all up, and you’ll shine her up too.” She smiled her wide, feral-cat smile, and he couldn’t help but grin back at his sire. The Midnight Sun was a fine name for Buffy.

    

     By the time the police backup arrived, the remaining evidence of a supernatural event was easily ignorable. Though the mud did get some comments after an unwary constable pulled over and parked in it; when he climbed out of his car he was trapped until he managed to get his shoes unlaced and could be pulled out of them to safety. Buffy was pleased that her alternate path had saved her new stompy boots, but she did her best not to rub her joy in Giles’ face as he grieved his second pair of wrecked footwear in a week. And somehow, in the commotion, Dru had slipped away.

     Buffy suspected the deputies were just turning a blind eye to the holes in their story because the suspect had so readily confessed to both the Pantsless Man’s murder and Drusilla’s abduction. Buffy and Anyanka had, ahem, been present at the scene to compare the evidence to the lava flow — after hours, but they were both well known to be hard workers, and it was dark all the time in the winter anyway. Giles and Spike had just come along to do a little night tourism after word had spread of spectacular geological activity. Once the red-headed witch was no longer crackling with dark energy, Buffy recognized her immediately: the girlfriend of the woman shot the previous year, whose death had never been satisfactorily solved. Buffy remembered how inconsolable she had been. The young woman’s babbling now about sorcery, revenge and resurrection was being chalked up to instability brought on by persistent grief, and she would be provided with counseling during her detention. The way Anyanka had caught Buffy’s eyes during this discussion suggested the Reykjavik Police Department might be more equipped to handle magical containment than Buffy could have imagined a week ago.

     Buffy leaned back against Giles’ car and watched as the last constable’s tail lights crossed the bridge at the power station and melted off into the night. She’d go in and augment her report in the morning. Right now, adrenaline crashing, there was nothing in the world she wanted more than a hot shower and to climb back into Spike’s bed. “Did any of you see where Drusilla went?”

     Spike came and lounged beside her against the car, not quite touching, but with her. “She went the direction you came from. May see her when we get back round to your car.”

     “But you’re not worried?”

     “Dru’s barmy, but she can take care of herself. She would’ve gone that way for a reason, even if it only makes sense to her.”

     Giles spoke up; he looked exhausted but didn’t seem to have realized it himself yet. “It’s perhaps just as well she wasn’t questioned by police … I mean, from what I’ve read of her. Of course, you yourself, Spike, are not really what I expected from what I read of you.”

     Spike’s lip curled. “A little more handsome, a little more clever?”

     “A little more honorable, a little more loyal … and  _considerably_  more educated. I saw your poetry collection.” Spike’s sneer fled, and Buffy could feel his body stiffen beside hers.

     “Oh: Watcher diaries,” said Anya dismissively. “I mean, they’re clearly written for a desired political effect. If they admitted up front that there were shades of grey in the demon world? They’d have people questioning their edicts. Which, frankly, are gross, Gestapo-level generalizations.”

     Giles’ discomfort was so vivid that Buffy laughed, though she wasn't entirely sure what she was laughing about. “ ‘Gestapo-level?' Are they really?”

     “Oh — never mind the demons. You should just see what they have to say about Slayers, as though you are all just little soldiers ready to be sent to your untimely deaths. Why, it’s like they barely think you’re human —” Anya suddenly stopped. Giles’ face had gone white.

     Spike slowly, deliberately, resumed his sneer. “ ’s that right, now?”

     “What’s a Slayer?” asked Buffy blankly.


End file.
